From Fashion to Fairways, Elizabeth Baugh’s Career Has Landed In Play
Overseeing ESPN.com's golf coverage, former fashion journalist Baugh leads the team at the Masters Tournament this week
AUGUSTA, Ga. – There was a time when ESPN.com deputy editor Elizabeth Baugh was pursuing a career in fashion industry media. But then her lifelong love of sports called, and her career took a major turn.
Now approaching her ninth anniversary at ESPN, Baugh is at Augusta National this week overseeing ESPN.com’s robust coverage of the Masters Tournament. Joined by writers Mark Schlabach and Paolo Uggetti, she is navigating an event that can change at any moment.
“We start planning for the Masters as far out as we can, but obviously, the storylines are changing all the time,” said Baugh.
She arrived at the event on Sunday, and along with editing stories, one of her primary duties is planning and discussing the event with the writers as it progresses.
Because the event does not allow phones on the golf course, Schlabach and Uggetti must leave their cell phones in the media building when they go out to follow players, conduct interviews, etc.
“We have to talk through every single story if Mark’s going to go out on the course,” she said. “Before he leaves, we talk about exactly who he’s going to go and try to get quotes from and exactly what he’s working on. There’s a lot of planning in that.”
In addition to golf, Baugh also oversees several other ESPN.com sports verticals and the editors and reporters who work on those sports – tennis, Olympics, UFC, boxing, WWE, NHL, and the Trending team.
But her career almost went in a totally different direction.
After graduating from James Madison University, the Virginia Beach, Va., native did a brief stint at a magazine before moving to New York to work in fashion journalism.
While in college, she had done an internship in London at a fashion blog. But then a job with the Elite Daily blog brought her to sports and it led to her being noticed by ESPN.
She started at ESPN on the social team but moved to editorial in 2017, advancing steadily to her current role.
At JMU, Baugh studied media arts and design, and she spent the better part of three years working on The Breeze, the student newspaper.
“I loved sports and grew up a sports person,” she said. “I always wanted to get back into it. At The Breeze, I didn’t work on the sports desk but was as heavy into it as they’d let me be at the time. It’s where I did my journalism resume-building.
“I think my studies in journalism and work at the paper really prepped me for a future in this industry.”
