Reporting from the front lines of Ghana’s biggest matches
(Courtesy of Susan Sarpomaa Owusu-Ansah)
23-year-old sports journalist Susan Sarpomaa Owusu-Ansah writes about finding her voice off the field.
My reporting career began on the field where I played football for my high school team. For me, sports have always been about community. When you play sports, you are always meeting new people — people you wouldn’t know from any other place — which helps take you out of where you were born and introduce you to new viewpoints and experiences. I loved socialising with teammates and making new friends who shared my passion and love for sports. Playing football in front of so many other people also helped me build confidence and mental strength. That’s why, at that young age, I dreamt of becoming a professional athlete.
At around the same time, I was developing a love of journalism. I remember every morning my family would go out to buy the newspaper and I would always get the sports paper just to read about my favourite teams in Ghana. It inspired me to start reporting for my school newspaper, but I wasn’t writing about sports yet.
In my final years of high school I sustained a knee injury after getting hit by a car. The accident made the prospect of pursuing a career as an athlete more difficult, but it wasn’t the main reason for my hesitation about turning professional. For one thing, most professional athletes in Ghana start playing football in school and then stop their education to train full time. But in my family, you do both: You go to school and you do your talent. Education was not optional.
“Here in Ghana, even if you are a successful athlete, as a woman you still face a lot of issues. The male players and media call you all sorts of names, and it’s presumed that every lady who plays football is bad or unskilled.”
For another thing, I wasn’t sure I was ready to face the stigma society places on women playing football. Here in Ghana, even if you are a successful athlete, as a woman you still face a lot of issues. The male players and media call you all sorts of names, and it’s presumed that every lady who plays football is bad or unskilled. That stigma — how people would see me — worried my parents, and it worried me too. I didn’t know if I would be strong enough to stand these things.
So I decided to stop playing football and do something else. I knew I was interested in journalism and that I loved sports, so I thought: “Why not try sports journalism?” I’d be able to spend time around athletes, still do what I love and report stories about what’s happening on the field.
After graduating high school, I attended the Ghana Institute of Journalism. The Institute is the prime journalism school here in Ghana; it’s the dream of most upcoming journalists to study there. Education is very important for journalism — not only learning how to read and write, but gaining practical experience in radio stations and TV studios. Most importantly, going to school with so many different people teaches you how to communicate with others. I learned a lot about how to go outside, relate to people’s emotions and respond to various people's attitudes.
(Courtesy of Susan Sarpomaa Owusu-Ansah)
In Ghana, the sports scene revolves around football. So since graduating from the Institute, I have mainly reported on football stories about both the women’s and the men’s teams. I spend most of my weekdays in the office writing stories about the league, reporting on the latest news and giving fans a preview of what’s happening in football that week. Sometimes on Tuesdays I’ll go out to interview players. My weekends are the busiest; I spend my Saturdays with the women’s league and my Sundays with the men’s league. I especially love it when I get to report on Asante Kotoko, the biggest football club in Ghana. They are the traditional club, so they have the most enthused fans — anything you write about the team, the fans want to read.
With the little platform I have as a sportscaster, I always try to report on more local content than anything else. I believe this is the role I play as a sports journalist in helping Ghanaian teams and athletes gain the representation they deserve in international media. These days you only hear about Europe; I’m sure there are sports fans in Europe who can’t even name a single Ghanaian football player. This shows the lack of interest European media has for African sports, but I believe it is also to do with how we represent ourselves. If sports reporters here in Ghana were doing what they were supposed to do — hyping up the premiere league and putting Ghanaian players on TV instead of only reporting on European teams — the rest of the world would have no choice but to notice. We have a responsibility as Ghanaian journalists to tell our community’s stories in a way that makes people take an interest in what we’re doing down here.
“With the little platform I have as a sportscaster, I always try to report on more local content than anything else. I believe this is the role I play as a sports journalist in helping Ghanaian teams and athletes gain the representation they deserve in international media.”
At 23 years old, I feel confident in my ability to report from the front lines of Ghana’s biggest matches. But honestly, it took me a while to find my footing as a sports journalist. The stigma against women in sports persists in Ghana. Athletes experience it the worst, but reporters face our own set of challenges. Sometimes when I go onto the field, male reporters will look at me like: “Eh? A lady reporter at a men’s game?!” Some of them think we are just hanging around the male footballers because we want to be involved with them romantically. Men in sports media receive more institutional support than women because people feel that they are more capable. They think that ladies complain too much, that we will miss work because of menstrual cramps or become pregnant all of a sudden and quit. They put these assumptions onto women who are in sports and use them to deny us the opportunities we deserve.
In high school and early on in my career, I let these challenges define me. I was very shy and scared to tweet or post on social media. What if someone abused me or said something bad? But then I attended the Africa Women’s Sports (AWS) Summit, a mentorship event for African women in sports led by the Ghanaian sportscaster Juliet Bawuah. Juliet has mentored a lot of young women journalists in Ghana — people look up to her and want to be like her. She taught me that you need to take what is yours: to go out and be passionate about what you want.
All the challenges that I mentioned that face young women in sports are easier if you have a mentor like Juliet. She’s been through the whole process and experienced every difficulty you can think of, and every time you talk to her she’s open and ready to share her experience. When I was first starting out, she kept on telling me: “You don’t have to listen to what people say. Be yourself and just do what you want to do.” And I knew what I wanted to do. I knew this was the field I wanted to be in, no matter what someone says about me. From Juliet, I learned to ignore the comments my male colleagues might make about me and trust in what I stand for. That is why the AWS Summit is so important. It gives girls an opportunity to meet mentors and role models so that when they face challenges they have someone to turn to.
Because of leaders like Juliet, the system has become more open for Ghanaian women in sports and sports media. The Ghanaian women’s football league has so much interest now, it is much more competitive today than it was two or three years ago. I love going to the stadium for a women’s match and seeing it filled up with people. You can see how fans are now getting some of the negative stereotypes out of their minds, so when they see a woman playing football it’s not a big deal anymore. It’s normal.
(Courtesy of Susan Sarpomaa Owusu-Ansah)
This progress makes me very proud to be Ghanaian. It’s creating more opportunity for women in all fields; every team has a female coach and a media team that is allowing more women to put their digital marketing work out there. And as sportscasters, we play our own role in giving those opportunities to women. My favourite thing about my job — more than attending matches and interviewing players — is exposing new talent. There are so many incredible female players out there who have not gotten the recognition they deserve, and I love that through me and my reporting their talent is identified and they get a better opportunity.
That’s why my next great ambition is to become a FIFA intermediary. Intermediaries (or sports agents) represent players and clubs, so if a club wants a player they talk to their intermediary who guides the negotiations with the team for the player. As a reporter, I see so many incredible players whose talents go to waste because they are mismanaged. So I started wondering, “How can I use my resources to make a difference for these talents?” In my job I have access to coaches and team owners, so if I identify a talent I can go talk to a coach and say, “Hey I have this player here, why don’t you look and see if you like them? And if you like the player, let’s talk about their salary and see how we can get them on the team.”
As an intermediary, I will focus on female players because they are generally less represented than the men. You could choose ten female players at random from a Ghanaian team and none of them would have a manager or an agent. So I thought, “OK, if I pursue the right training I can get a license and represent these players myself.” And it’s not just about managing their careers. Sometimes I’ll be reporting on a story and see a very good player, and when I talk to her I realise that she can’t even provide for her basic needs like food or sanitary pads. As an intermediary, I want to see that young women in sports are receiving both the opportunities they deserve and the compensation they need to care for themselves and their families.
“Men in sports media receive more institutional support than women because people feel that they are more capable. They think that ladies complain too much, that we will miss work because of menstrual cramps or become pregnant all of a sudden and quit.”
But this work cannot fall onto young women’s shoulders alone. Leaders in and outside of Ghana need to pour more resources into women’s sports. Invest in them, support them and encourage women and girls to go after their passions. If their interest is in sports, allow them to follow it — just as you allow boys to pursue sports if they want to.
There are surely young women reading this with ambitions of becoming a sportscaster, and to you I have this to say: The world is large, not small. Whatever you want to do, you can achieve it. You just need to believe in yourself and set your mind towards it, even if you are shy or afraid of public speaking. Trust me, it took me a long time to come out of that shyness. But there’s no need to be scared. You will make errors and people will laugh at you, but it won’t end your world. You will learn from it and move on and improve. But if you keep yourself indoors then no one is going to correct your errors for you. No one is even going to know what you are capable of. Girls should be bold, stand for what they believe in and do what they love to do.
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