You see Jen Lada on ESPN’s highest-profile shows and think: She has it made.
There she is, co-hosting “Get Up” with Mike Greenberg, doing a feature on Bears tight end Zach Miller for “Monday Night Countdown” and profiling Heisman Trophy candidate Will Grier for “College GameDay.” She will be at college football’s epicenter this weekend, hosting “College Football Live” on the eve of Ohio State-Penn State.
Perhaps you’re one of her nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram who sees those images of her gorgeous family and thinks: What a perfect life.
Here’s the thing, though: What you haven’t seen and heard is what makes her Jen Lada. The grit. The hustle. The hard times. All the real-life stuff.
“She is persistent,” said ESPN Vice President Lee Fitting, who oversees “GameDay.” “She’s a fighter.”
She’s also brutally honest.
She waited tables to supplement a $23,000-a-year job in Rockford. As a single mom, she fell behind on daycare bills. She had two miscarriages, saying: “You grieve and recover.”
Her first broadcasting job interview out of Marquette ended with the sports director pressuring her to swim naked in the pool at his house. She shared that story on Twitter a year before the #MeToo movement took shape.
Professionally, she viewed herself as a failure in her early days at ESPN. She arrived in 2015 after two years at NBC Sports Chicago, then called CSN Chicago. A partnership with Colin Cowherd ended before it began when he bolted for Fox Sports. A radio show with co-host Jorge Sedano quickly fizzled.
“I was devastated,” Lada said on Michelle Smallmon’s “Small Talk” podcast. “The network said basically: Don’t call us, we’ll call you. … It still feels like a Scarlet Letter.”
Lada, 37, dodged ESPN layoffs and rebuilt her career by attending every ESPN self-improvement seminar and knocking on the door of practically every content producer. A feature on Kyle Schwarber raised her stock.
“I love to work,” Lada says. “I feel fulfilled when I’m able to contribute. I like moving. My husband always says I don’t know how to shut it down. I get shut down. I just crash.”
When her eyes are open, she balances work and home life. Quite literally, in some cases. She conducted this phone interview with 7-month-old Layla on her lap.
Lada was five months pregnant with Layla last fall when she married Dario Melendez, a Fox Sports reporter in Milwaukee.
“If Layla stayed hidden,” Lada says, “I promised I’d buy her a convertible when he she turns 16.”
Lada’s Jack Russell Terrier is named Wrigley. “Sweet home Chicago” is in her Twitter bio. And son Chase does a victory dance after favorable Cubs outcomes. Melendez is assigned to the Bucks and Brewers, but …
“We are quick to remind him that he is not a Brewers fan; he was born and raised in Florida,” he says. “And he certainly enjoyed those (Cubs) World Series tickets I got for him.”
Cheeky. Clever.
Those are two of the qualities that made her successful on CSN’s “Kap & Haugh” show before she left for ESPN.
“She’s a bulldog,” David Kaplan said. “In a business where a lot of people — not just women, men too — are afraid to give an opinion because they don’t want to ruffle the feathers of a coach, player or organization, she was more than willing. She is capable, hard-working and tough. Intense.”
Lada grew up in the blue-collar town of Spring Grove, Ill., near the Wisconsin border, the daughter of Connie (“a huge baseball fan”) and Bill, a junior-high track coach and athletic director.
“My dad would have me keep score at the volleyball and basketball games,” she says. “Dad was responsible for getting the gym ready for games. He got the gate ready, pushed the broom. There was a pride he took in that role.”
Lada ran distance track events at Marian Central Catholic, where she is in the school’s hall of fame, and captained the cheerleading squad at Marquette.
She scraped by in Rockford and worked seven years in Milwaukee, never making $50,000 while providing for Chase after her divorce.
She met Melendez at Lambeau Field when the two were TV reporters covering the Packers.
“He was the new sportscaster in town, I had recently separated and had no interest in dating,” she says. “He sent me a typo-filled email. I thought: Who is this schmuck who can’t spell?”
He worked his way into her good graces.
Lada has done the same at ESPN, recently signing a multiyear extension.
When she’s not burping Layla, she’s researching, traveling, interviewing, hosting shows, sideline reporting and knocking out features.
Fitting, the ESPN executive who oversees college sports, tells her: “Take a minute to appreciate. There are not many who are doing it all.”
That smell-the-roses stuff is as welcome as a Cubs loss.
“Many in our business take what’s given to them,” Fitting said. “Jen always wants to do more.”
tgreenstein@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @TeddyGreenstein
