Bonnie-Jill Laflin is a trailblazing sports broadcaster, TV personality, author, and philanthropist. She is the first and only female NBA scout, holding the front-office executive position with the Los Angeles Lakers, and the first woman to dance at a professional level for three teams in two sports—the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys. She is the first woman to be awarded six championship rings in two professional sports, earning a Super Bowl ring and five NBA championship rings. Laflin is co-host of the brand-new “Women’s Western Sports Roundup” on the Cowgirl Channel and has reported for many high-profile networks, including ESPN, NBA TV, NBC/NBC Sports, NFL Films, CBS, E!, BBC Sports, SiriusXM, and Fox Sports. She is founder of the non-profit Hounds and Heroes and Horses and resides on her ranch in Fort Worth, Texas, with her rescued animals.

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Excerpt from Chapter 3: Jayne Kennedy

One of the first women to infiltrate the male-dominated world of sports announcing with a role on CBS’s The NFL Today.

Jayne Kennedy is not concerned with outside expectations.

She is only concerned with her own vision.

Jayne Kennedy does things her own way.

As an eighteen-year-old high school student, she was the first Black woman to represent the state of Ohio in the Miss America Pageant. During rehearsals for the introduction sequence of the 1970 pageant, she was told that no one would recognize her small town of Wickliffe, so she would have to introduce herself as a contestant from Cleveland. She knew better, though. She knew how much representation meant to her friends and family at home.

“I get on stage, all the rehearsals for two weeks, and I’m saying ‘Jayne Harrison, Cleveland, Ohio.’ The night of the pageant, we are live, and I walk on stage and I say, ‘Jayne Harrison, Wickliffe, Ohio.’ My friends had mounted elevision sets at the prom so that they could watch—when I said ‘Wickliffe, Ohio,’ they went crazy.”

Indeed, competing in Miss America meant that Jayne missed much of her senior year of high school. President of her class, she would not only miss events during the leadup to the pageant, but it also meant that she would compete in Miami Beach on the night of her senior prom— more than a thousand miles from her closest friends. Shouting out Wickliffe from the stage was her way of being home.

That hometown pride meant so much to everyone back home. In Wickliffe, life was slow and simple, the kind of upbringing that values neighborhoods and community. Jayne Kennedy remembers it vividly.

“It was a town that you could lay outside til ten o’clock at night in the grass and fall asleep, and it’s no problem,” she recalled. “We knew all of our neighbors. Our house had the most yard space, and my dad had built

a lot of playground stuff. So everybody came to our house.”

Memories of endless summer days playing card games with family and friends, weekends spent rotating chores around the house, and a strong sense of belonging buoyed her childhood. Jayne Kennedy grew up knowing that she belonged.

So nearly a decade later when Jayne first auditioned for the iconic NFL Today television program, she waited through three rounds of auditions before getting her own tryout. The rounds of rejection made it clear that she would, once again, have to do things her own way.

“They weren’t looking for me, because the other sixteen girls were all blonde,” she said. “They weren’t looking for anybody black. But that’s not gonna stop me. There I am doing the very best that I could.”

Already boasting an eclectic and impressive media resume and attempting to find her way through the network’s outdated and problematic parameters for its hiring process, she took matters into her own hands to earn her spot in the audition process. A phone call to Cleveland Browns legend Jim Brown began a cascade of dominos, which eventually—finally—resulted in an audition.

At that point, “everything started happening so fast,” she said, adding that she was “in New York that next week for the audition. And apparently the press department at CBS Sports said it was the biggest talent search since Scarlett O’Hara, and they had seen maybe eighty people on their short list.”

Once she was in New York, it was time for Jayne Kennedy to shine.