MANHATTAN BEACH — One door closes, and another opens.
Kelli Tennant stepped away for a while after the conclusion of the 2017 Dodgers season. After five seasons with the Time Warner and then Spectrum SportsNet networks, working on baseball, basketball and soccer telecasts and studio shows, she left Spectrum last fall, shut down her social media accounts for a few months, and regrouped even as viewers wonder where she went.
She’s been back for a while, and her next chapter is multi-faceted.
Tennant is one of the tri-anchors of Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour, which brought her close to home this weekend with the Manhattan Beach Open, the sixth of eight stops on the beach circuit’s 2018 tour.
She also has launched an interview-oriented podcast, “The Platform,” which delves into women’s issues and concerns including but not limited to wellness, self-acceptance, workplace issues, and parenting.
The volleyball gig is a natural transition for Tennant, who played the sport in high school (Temecula Chaparral) and college (USC).
“I can kind of do it blindly sometimes because I know everyone,” she said. “I grew up with a lot of these players; a lot of them we played club indoor against, or in college.
“They understand what we’re doing. And just because I know a story and know the inside scoop doesn’t mean everyone else does. And so I think the best thing about this is, so many of the players have embraced this so much because they realize not only what this can do for their brand but also what it can do for the sport.
“It’s funny sometimes when I have the McKibbin brothers (Maddison and Riley) up here. We went to USC together, we used to party together. They look at me like, ‘Are you really asking me that? We know what you were like in college.’ So those moments are really fun.”
Amazon is in the first year of a three-year deal with the AVP, and the format of the coverage is still being refined. There are cameras on the stadium court and three outside courts, with match coverage, on-court interviews and segments in the on-site studio.
“We just rotate and we try to get breaks when we can,” Tennant said of herself and co-anchors Camryn Irwin and Kevin Barnett. “There’s three of us doing eight or nine hours of volleyball every single day, with a morning show, an evening show plus about eight shows in between throughout the day. So it’s a lot of stuff happening.”
The eventual goal seems to be to have cameras on every court and the ability to hop from one to another as needed. At Manhattan Beach, for example, there are 16 courts plus the stadium court, although by Sunday’s final day many of those outer courts will be quiet.
One plus seems to be total buy-in from the players, who understand they are pursuing a sport that has taken some hits over the years, is trying to rebuild its profile, and needs all the goodwill and attention it can get.
“There’s no drama,” Tennant said. “I think I’ve been told one time in five stops, ‘No, I don’t want to talk right now.’ And they happened to be losing … Everyone else, it’s been like, ‘What can I do for you?’ We’ve had Jeremy Casebeer ask Camryn if he could shoot something. A player is asking us (if he can) go do something. That never happens.”
Remember, she used to cover baseball, where the cooperation level — even with the team broadcaster — tends to be far spottier.
The Amazon coverage provides immediacy as opposed to NBC, which holds the TV network rights to finals and has opted for delayed coverage, in most cases, on NBC Sports Network. Only two events were slated for live coverage on NBC itself: New York in June and Sunday’s Manhattan Beach Open final.
Amazon does not reveal viewership numbers for its Prime service, although a Reuters report earlier this year estimated its U.S. audience at around 26 million. Similarly, no one is announcing any numbers for the AVP shows. But indications are the retention rate is high, the viewership is worldwide and includes a lot of young people, and the viewers stick around longer than the norm for sports video.
“We have two Amazon executives that travel with us,” Tennant said. “We don’t get specific numbers but we know they’re really happy.”
The AVP year will end with tournaments in Chicago (Aug. 30-Sept. 2) and on Waikiki Beach (Sept. 14-16). Whether there will be additional TV work after that, Tennant said she’s not sure.
But the podcast is a 12-month production.
She was inspired by her own health issues to provide a place to help other women. Tennant was diagnosed with fibromyalgia before her junior year at USC and with Epstein Barr virus last July, and also has a genetic mutation which causes chronic fatigue.
“I’ve dealt with depression through my life, and anxiety, and so many health issues,” she said. “And I wanted to have those conversations. And so we do talk about depression and suicide and loss, and how difficult it is to breastfeed your child, and all those things that you know a lot of people don’t want to talk about but are really important issues that affect millions of people, that we’re so scared as a society to bring forward.
“Those are the conversations that I wanted to have, and so I’m talking to people that are also very like-minded and open … they’re willing to share their roughest, darkest moments to help someone get through that themselves because we all have similar experiences. They may vary or differ a little bit, but they’re all very similar. And so if you can have one person that says, ‘I went through that, too,’ then you build a community and you understand you’re not alone.”
Since it launched in mid-July, she said, “we’ve had almost 10,000 downloads in just three weeks.” She has already done dozens of long-form interviews, with medical experts and entrepreneurs, psychologists and moms and women who work in male-dominated fields.
The interviewees have different fields of expertise. But there is a common thread: Looking out for each other.
jalexander@scng.com
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter
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