By Arianne Edwards (‘27)
In an era where women’s sports are experiencing a rise in visibility, media coverage is now catching up. Emma Healy (A&S ‘23) has found herself at the forefront of that momentum, covering professional women’s teams as a reporter at The Boston Globe. Healy is the first reporter at the paper to have this beat, which she started earlier this year. Already, she’s been watching as teams like the Boston Fleet and Boston Legacy FC are drawing record crowds.
“People are starting to tune in,” Healy said. “There are more and more people who are realizing that women’s sports is just as valuable a product.”
Healy began her journey at BC knowing she wanted to do journalism as soon as she stepped foot on campus. She covered sports for The Heights, writing over 100 articles about BC football, basketball, and hockey, while also dabbling in stories about music, food, and nearby Boston news.
“It was really just about practice and learning and trying to read as much as I could and trying to get better,” she said.
During her sophomore year, Healy began working part-time at the Globe covering high school sports, where she juggled tasks like taking scores, updating databases, and reporting on local games. Alongside her work with The Heights and school responsibilities, she covered soccer, swimming and diving, and lacrosse.
The experience proved formative, giving her the opportunity to work with professional editors and build relationships in the newsroom that later helped her secure a full-time role there after graduation as a sports content producer.
Healy's new role is part of a larger movement to increase the awareness of women’s sports. Many women’s leagues and teams have struggled for years to get coverage in major news outlets, but as the need for more in-depth narratives grows, that gap is starting to fill.
“Everybody's writing about the Patriots, everybody's writing about the Red Sox, but there are very few people writing about the Fleet or Boston Legacy FC,” Healy said. As interest grows, so does the responsibility to tell these stories.
From Healy, the job requires a balancing act of coverage and deadlines, often stretching late into the night and across back-to-back games. Healy described sports journalism as “a grind,” pointing to the unpredictable hours and constant movement required to keep up with the beat.
On any given week, that can mean covering multiple games in a row, filing stories on quick turnaround, and immediately moving on to the next assignment. In a recent Instagram post, Healy documented the demanding pace of her work, sharing that she drove 300 miles, attended four games and two practices, and wrote five stories in just five days. “You are gonna be working the most random hours,” she said. Still, she added that despite the pace, “I’m having so much fun,” explaining that the intensity of the work is part of what makes it rewarding.
That shift in coverage has also shaped how Healy approaches reporting itself. Rather than focusing only on the final score or statistical outcome, she prioritizes the context and conversations that surround the game. “You don’t need to narrate the events of the game,” she said, underlining that readers are already familiar with what they’ve watched or seen in the box score.
Instead, her goal is to offer something deeper: The perspectives and details that don’t make it onto a broadcast, drawn from postgame interviews and player interactions. The most compelling stories, she said, come from those human elements that reveal what athletes experience beyond the field.
Rather than viewing women’s sports as a narrow beat, she sees it as an expanding space with untapped stories, growing audiences, and room to define what modern sports coverage can look like.
As women’s sports continues to grow, Healy sees her role as part of a larger shift in how those stories are told. With only a small number of reporters dedicated full-time to the beat, she recognizes both the responsibility and opportunity that comes with helping shape its coverage.
Still, she returns to the same motivation that drew her to journalism in the first place. “I always tell people that I love my job because I would be watching sports anyway,” she said. “I might as well get paid to do it.”