Inside Kelly Gramlich’s rise from Clemson basketball player to ACC Network star

There was plenty to cover at October’s ACC Tipoff, the annual media day for the deepest women’s college basketball conference in the country, and Kelly Gramlich was right in the middle of it.

From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Gramlich broadcast live from the second floor of an uptown Charlotte hotel, helping anchor ACC Network’s wall-to-wall coverage of the October preseason event with nine straight hours of TV interviews and analysis.

The former Clemson shooting guard and two-time graduate of the university was, quite literally, operating at the center of ACC women’s basketball.

It wasn’t her first time.

Or her last.

If you’re a fan of women’s hoops in the conference, you’re probably a fan of Gramlich, 29, who started her fourth season as an ACC Network game and studio analyst earlier this fall.

Ten years ago, she was a record-breaking sharpshooter for the Clemson women’s basketball team. Today, she’s one of the chief chroniclers of a league that, last year, sent eight teams to the NCAA tournament for the fourth consecutive season.

How did Gramlich jump from one world to the other?

It’s a long, winding road for someone who completed undergrad having little to no idea what the rest of her life would look like and now gets compliments like these from Debbie Antonelli, her ESPN coworker and one of the most influential broadcasters in women’s basketball history.

“I’m really proud of what she’s done,” Antonelli said. “I’m proud of how hard she works. I’m proud of how invested she is. She understands our responsibility to be prepared and to grow the game, and that makes me really happy.”

With her fourth season underway, Gramlich, who credits good people and good fortune for her undeniably rapid rise, is still wrapping her head around it all.

“I feel so lucky to do this job,” she told The State. “Just really lucky.”

Shooting the lights out

The Clemson women’s basketball staff had one piece of advice for Gramlich when she arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of 2011: “Shoot the rock.”

“I had the ultimate green light,” she said.

Point taken. Gramlich, a 5-foot-10 shooting guard, only started a third of her games at Clemson from 2011 to 2014 but averaged 6.5 points and graduated as a 33.4% career shooter.

And she’ll always look back fondly on the two-game stretch in December 2013 when, as a junior, she set Clemson’s single-game record for 3-pointers by making eight of 12 against S.C. State — then nearly broke it five days later by making seven of 13 against UNLV.

“There’s no better feeling in the world,” she said.

It was a feeling Gramlich had been chasing her entire life, dating back to childhood in Austin, Texas. But five months after scorching the nets at Littlejohn Coliseum she was at crossroads, with a lingering knee injury and a slow realization her basketball career was reaching a conclusion.

Gramlich had majored in communications at Clemson and was still on campus, tackling a two-year master’s degree. So, at the invitation of Jeff Kallin, a longtime member of Clemson athletic communications, Gramlich started chipping in for the school’s sports PR staff, mostly previewing, analyzing and recapping her former program’s games in 2014.

In that role she overlapped with William Qualkinbush, a local radio host who called Clemson women’s basketball games and, as Gramlich quickly learned, was also a worthy adversary for any and all impassioned sports debates.

One of their more epic back-and-forths took place at the office fax machine and centered around whether a jump-shooting team (namely, the fledgling Golden State Warriors) could actually win an NBA championship. Kallin, passing by, heard a snippet and cracked a joke.

“You guys should do this on the radio.”

An ‘absolutely crazy’ offer

Gramlich quickly found her niche in radio after interning that winter at WCCP 105.5 FM, Clemson’s flagship radio station better known as The Roar.

She was a quick learner and a natural behind a headset, too, enough that Clemson entrusted her with color analyst duties for the following women’s basketball season, with Qualkinbush working as her play-by-play partner on radio broadcasts.

That’s where they started to develop an on-air rapport that only grew when Gramlich finished grad school and took a full-time job at The Roar as a co-host and producer for Qualkinbush’s show, “Out Of Bounds.”

Every weekday from 9 a.m. to noon, and later noon to 3 p.m., Gramlich (last name pronounced “gram-lick”) was knee deep in the world of daily sports radio. It’s a job that might sound cushy but, in reality, requires extensive preparation and creativity and daily monitoring of topics. Those three hours do not fill themselves.

“But when you do it with the right person, it can just flow,” Gramlich said.

It helped that the hottest topic in town, the Clemson football team, was emerging as one of the best programs in the country. From 2015 to 2020, coach Dabo Swinney’s Tigers won six straight ACC championships, made six straight College Football Playoffs, reached four national championships and brought home two national titles. Worth discussing, no?

Soon enough, Gramlich started getting recognized around the Upstate for her on-air opinions rather than her 3-point accuracy. National recognition followed.

In 2020, her fourth year at The Roar, she earned a spot on Radio Ink’s “30 Under 30” list and was a finalist for the National Sports Media Association’s South Carolina Sportscaster of the Year Award.

Somehow, amid her full-time job at The Roar and four seasons of Clemson women’s basketball radio broadcasts, Gramlich also made time for a hodgepodge of additional on-air gigs. Clemson men’s basketball. SoCon men’s basketball. The Big South women’s basketball tournament.

“I didn’t really care what they paid me,” she said.

Those assignments, mostly relegated to streaming-only channels, were invaluable. Gramlich started to develop a distinctive voice and presence as a TV analyst — and a pretty strong reel, or broadcast résumé, which she’d occasionally float to network executives for feedback.

In June 2019, one of those reels landed in the Twitter direct messages of Aaron Katzman. He’s a longtime ESPN studio show producer who, three years ago, was heavily involved in launching the start-up ACC Network — and finding young, talented broadcasters to fill out its staff.

“I specifically remember watching her reel and immediately sending a note to a couple of other people at ACC Network and ESPN saying, ‘We need to hire this person on our basketball team,’ ” Katzman said.

A month later, Gramlich was driving to her favorite Upstate barbecue joint, Bobby’s BBQ in Fountain Inn, when an ESPN executive called her with a life-changing ACC Network job offer.

“It was crazy,” she said. “Absolutely crazy.”

Finding a voice

Now, entering Year 4 with ACC Network, Gramlich can look back, poke fun at her October 2019 studio debut — “I probably looked like a scared, scared young kid” — and reflect on how far she and her broadcasting personality have come. And what is that personality, exactly?

It’s one of preparation. When she’s assigned to call a game, Gramlich fills out a handwritten broadcasting board with every relevant nugget she can find online … and then might look at it twice during the actual broadcast. It’s a time-consuming yet effective memory exercise.

Gramlich also hits offseason events such as ACC spring meetings to connect with coaches in more relaxed settings. And she browses star players’ social media feeds for head starts on any fun facts or NIL deals that could make for good filler content or an insightful interview question.

She leans on personal experience, too, to inform her broadcasts. She has no qualms about criticizing players, but she strives to do so with proper context. Say she’s calling a game in which a frustrated player picks up a fifth, disqualifying foul.

“I’m saying that as, ‘So-and-so picked up her fifth foul. That’s something where her emotion got the best of her. She’s obviously just trying to win,’ ” Gramlich said. “I’m going to paint it in a positive way, because I know what it’s like to be a student-athlete and I know what it’s like to put all that pressure on yourself.”

Over time, she’s also learned to not take herself too seriously and to let her personality shine on broadcasts. Gramlich, for instance, loves corny jokes. So when she was calling a second round NCAA tournament game between N.C. State and Kansas State last March and Raina Perez, the Wolfpack’s starting point guard, couldn’t miss a jumper, you best believe she took advantage.

“I probably said ‘make it Raina’ four or five times,” Gramlich said, laughing.

A face of the conference

Ask people in and around ACC women’s basketball coverage, and they’ll tell you Gramlich’s combination of analysis and quirkiness is striking the perfect tone for a league chock full of superstars and fun personalities.

Gramlich’s voice is also a “huge part” of growing college women’s basketball media coverage in general, according to current Clemson coach Amanda Butler.

“It’s what our sport deserves, and Kelly’s the best of that,” Butler said. “Her heart’s in the right place, she’s smart, she’s competent and she can deliver the message … you want to know what she thinks about the play you just saw or the call that was just made.”

Indeed, the 2022 women’s NCAA tournament sold out its ad inventory and set all sorts of viewership high marks, according to ESPN research. The ACC was a big part of that with eight of its 15 teams reaching the tournament, four reaching the Elite Eight and one, Louisville, reaching the Final Four. Gramlich was there to cover it all.

She’ll reprise her role this season for a league that had a nation-best five teams (Louisville, Notre Dame, N.C. State, UNC and Virginia Tech) ranked among the AP’s preseason top 15.

Gramlich’s ACC Network schedule is loaded. During conference play, it’ll include weekly flights to ESPN’s Bristol headquarters for Ladies Night, the network’s flagship Thursday night women’s basketball studio show that Gramlich hosts with Kelsey Riggs and former Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw. She’ll also travel to an ACC campus each weekend to prepare Saturday and call a Sunday game for the network.

Gramlich, who lives in Greenville with her husband, Nick, also has an in-home studio where she can do live TV hits or call games remotely. Oh, and don’t forget about “Gramlich & Mac Lain,” the year-round ACC football podcast she co-hosts with Eric Mac Lain, her longtime friend and a former Clemson offensive lineman who’s become a rising star of his own at ACC Network.

That’s quite the docket, and it doesn’t even include potential NCAA tournament broadcast opportunities (she’s called eight postseason games for ESPN the last two years). No wonder she left her full-time hosting position at The Roar last April after somehow juggling her daily radio responsibilities for three years on top of everything she was doing for ACC Network.

It was a bittersweet yet logical end to Chapter One of her sports media career, and one that her lasting Clemson connections saw coming long before she did.

“She’s just a top-notch human being,” Kallin said.

“She wasn’t just thrown in there because they needed somebody,” Qualkinbush said. “She got that job because she earned it and because that’s what she’s capable of doing. I can’t wait to continue to see her grow and make a name for herself.”

There’s that pesky moniker again. Rising star. Four seasons into a dream career she never could have predicted, one that’s taken her from Texas to South Carolina to the country’s most recognizable sports platform, Gramlich tries to be “really grateful for where I am,” she said, while acknowledging that “I still have so much more to do, and so much more that I can improve on.”

“I think that’s the athlete mentality of it,” Gramlich said. “It’s like, ‘OK, you hit (eight) threes in the last game. What are you going to do in the next game?”

Based on her Clemson career, she’ll hit seven more. Broadcast style.