It wasn’t that long ago that Francesca Enea was hitting home runs from one knee in a Florida Gators uniform. Since the finale of her spectacular playing career in Gainesville and the professional softball career that immediately followed, Enea now has established herself as one of the softball broadcasting industry’s brightest young stars.
A three-time All-American during her career as a Gator, Enea remains one of the program’s all-time legends. She finished her playing career as the holder of seven program records, including career home runs and RBIs. She helped lead the Gators to the first three Women’s College World Series appearances in program history in 2008, ’09, and 2010. Following her collegiate career, Enea spent several years in a USSSA Pride uniform, contributing to the squad that won back-to-back regular-season league titles in 2011 and 2012.
No rookie in front of the television cameras during her playing days, a career in sports media was Enea’s dream from an early age. She names ESPN reporter and former Stanford softball player Ramona Shelburne as a mentor during her high school days, but the potential perils of combining that difficult major with being a student-athlete caused her to change course and pursue another avenue after she had been in college just a short while.
“I started majoring in telecommunications, but then I kind-of got hit by the thought of ‘this is going to be really hard for you to do while also being a student-athlete,” Enea shared. “And truthfully, I also shied away from it somewhat because I wasn’t sure if I could be successful doing it. So I picked something else and just thought I would keep that in the back of my mind, that maybe I would pick it back up someday.”
A company that televised high school sports came calling in 2012, and they gave Enea her first foot in the door of the broadcasting world. As for her first foray on the mic, she uses the adjectives “really rough and raw” to describe her performance, but credits her husband Christian, himself a television newsman, with encouraging her along the way.
“I could tell how much better I could have been,” Enea said. “And my husband, who is in this industry, would say the same thing to me. ‘You’re pretty rough, but when you get lost in a moment and in a thought, the things that you’re saying are next-level, so we just need to keep working on it.'”
As she worked to critique herself and perfect her craft, Enea was still behind the mic and calling high school games in 2017 when an unexpected phone call changed the trajectory of her broadcasting career.
“[ESPN’s] Meg Aronowitz called me three years ago,” Enea recalled. “Just out of the blue, she called me. That was the first year that ESPN was broadcasting the regionals from all sixteen host sites, and Meg told me that she had randomly been in Tampa and heard me call high school games, and she wanted me to call a regional.”
“At that point in time, I had really given up on calling anything bigger than high school,” Enea added. “But I love [broadcasting]so much; it’s so much fun. And that call gave me the mindset of, ‘well, maybe this is something that I can keep working on and growing in.”
The 2020 campaign will also mark Enea’s third season calling games for the SEC Network+ from her old home of Katie Seashole Pressly Stadium in Gainesville. A two-hour drive from her home in Orlando, returning frequently to her alma mater isn’t the only reason that Enea makes the trip.
“Of course, I love seeing my Gators,” she said with a laugh, “but I really love being able to get those reps in the booth. It helps me so much to have that chance to work on some things that I’ve struggled with or that I’m trying to master; something I might not have been strong in during a regional in the past or something that I haven’t done and need to practice, like a rollout or coming back from commercial break. SEC+ has really done a great job of helping me get better in that sense, as well.”
Enea’s work ethic and natural talent in the booth have not gone unnoticed by her peers. “Francesca breaks things down so well and so eloquently,” one industry peer recently commented for this story. “She notices a lot of little nuances, and she always knows her stuff.”
The aspects of Enea’s commentating that gather the most acclaim also happen to be her favorite parts of the job. “I love hitting. I love breaking things down, and seeing all of the different strategies and techniques and verbiage that a coach uses to try and get the best out of certain athletes,” she said. “I look and see what makes someone a great hitter, and what it is that they might need to improve on or that they’re struggling with. I see that kind of thing really easily, and getting to do that as a job is really great.”
