NFL reporter Jane Slater has been trying to prove for most of her career that she is far more than just a pretty girl.
And the NFL Network star showed her mettle by hitting a training dummy with a brutal tackle during some practice drills with the Dallas Cowboys.
“Oh I think I got concussed,” Slater jokingly said afterwards.
“You’re good, Jane, you’re good,” NFL Network analyst Brian Baldinger replied.
“That’s good, that’s the way to attack it.”
Slater has established herself as a rising star at the NFL Network since joining the channel in 2016.
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The Dallas-based reporter appears on several programs such as NFL Now, NFL Total Access, and NFL GameDay Morning.
But it has been a long journey to get to this point for Slater after she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 with a degree in journalism and government.
Slater sent 50 VHS copies of her newsreels to newsrooms across the US hoping to land her first gig but was met with multiple rejections.
Looking to become part of the radio industry, she resorted to taking a job in sales at NewsRadio 1080 KRLD in Dallas.
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She soon landed work on air locally in Texas but she was covering the weather and traffic rather than sports, which was her passion.
“I was miserable. I was a 30-year-old anchor working with no benefits and living with my parents," Slater told D magazine.
Slater thought she got her big break with a role at ESPN's Longhorn Network in 2014 but two years later, she was out of work and was considering leaving journalism.
“I was a 36-year-old, broke woman with bad credit card debt,” she says.
“And I was looking for jobs in medical sales or real estate. I thought I had gone as far as I could in journalism.”
In a last-ditch attempt to salvage her career, Slater sent in an audition tape to the NFL Network in 2016 for an on-air reporter job covering the Cowboys.
It paid off, with Slater having emerged in the role as a leading voice on the Cowboys in the past few years.
Along the way, though, she has had to prove time and again that she did not land the role because of her good looks.
“The perception around me was, ‘Oh, she’s just a pretty girl that is rehearsing and aggregating information'," she said.
“And ‘pretty-girl conception’ can become a threat when trying to do my job.
"The initial insinuation at an NFL combine or at the Super Bowl when a coach, executive, or player is out with me is, ‘Oh, there must be something going on there'."
But in 2018, Slater definitively proved her journalistic ability with an exclusive interview with Dez Bryant after the star wide receiver was released from the Cowboys.
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"It’s still difficult for me to get a lunch or dinner with GMs or other guys in this market,” she said.
"But now, I don’t think they view me as the pretty girl, anymore."
