Grace Grill ’17 joined the team at WJZ in Baltimore as a sports anchor in November 2024, covering the Orioles and the Ravens. In the short time since, she has cemented herself as a trusted voice in the world of sportscasting.
Grace Grill, a Public Relations, Radio and TV Broadcasting, and Applied Communication major from Harrisburg, found herself meandering through the WVYC-FM radio station at York College of Pennsylvania. It was during the middle of the 2015 NCAA college basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. A friend who hosted a radio show there had invited a few friends for a tour.
While exploring the station, Grill ’17 got into a heated discussion about the teams still in the tournament. Overhearing the conversation, Jeffrey Schiffman, WVYC Radio Station Manager and an Instructor in Audio & Radio Production, poked his head around a corner and asked Grill if she’d like to call a Spartan basketball game.
Grill was taken aback. She had come to York College as a Marketing major, then switched to Political Science. She also had toyed with the idea of attending law school. None of it felt like the right choice. While she’d been a high school athlete and played many intramural sports at York College, she never pictured herself as a sportscaster.
Still, Grill decided to trust Schiffman’s broadcasting instincts. She knew a few of the women on the Spartan basketball team and had played basketball in high school.
“I said, ‘You know what, why not?’ My parents always encouraged me to try things out of my comfort zone.”
Displaying passion and knowledge
Even in that first sportscasting experience, Grill exuded a natural ability to do the job.
“You could see the sparkle in her eye,” says Schiffman. “She had that passion, and she knew the sport.”
After calling that basketball game, Grill was hooked. The former player enjoyed being around the sport in a different way. She learned to do play-by-play coverage and color commentary.
She tried her hand at operating the game camera and learned how the radio station functions.
In what she saw as a hobby, Schiffman, who worked in broadcasting for three decades before coming to York College, saw real career potential. During Grill’s junior year, Schiffman sat her down and asked if she had considered a career in broadcasting.
During the Spring Semester of that year, Grill switched her major to Communication. It came with one condition: she didn’t want to extend the time needed to earn her degree. She crunched the credits and realized that she could graduate on time with a hodgepodge of majors in Public Relations, Radio and TV Broadcasting, and Applied Communication.
A decade later, Grill has established herself as a sports anchor and multimedia reporter at WJZ, the CBS station in Baltimore. The city is known as a top 30 media market in the broadcasting world. During one of Grill’s classes, Lowell Briggs, a now-retired Communication Professor, printed a list of the top 200 media markets. He circled the bottom 10 and told the students that if they wanted to pursue a career in media, these were the places they would be working.
Many broadcasters work their entire careers and never reach a top-30 market. For Grill, that achievement would come fairly soon.
Being shy of the camera
Switching her major in her junior year meant Grill had a lot of catching up to do. Most of her classmates had trained with cameras and recording equipment for nearly three years. And Grill was terrified when she was in front of the camera.
“I hated it,” she says. “I got such bad anxiety. Now I do it every day and don’t even think about it.”
Schiffman, who has witnessed her transformation, often shares Grill’s stand-up reports and live broadcasts with his students as models of how to act on camera.
“I think that’s one of the great things about York College,” he says. “We say to our students, you might be hesitant to be on camera, but we’re going to do it in an atmosphere where there’s nothing to lose. It’s the place to make mistakes, learn, and get comfortable in front of the camera.”
Former Mass Communication Instructor Robert Mott, along with Briggs, helped Grill catch up on all the training she had missed. Internships were key to helping her build invaluable connections in the field.
During Grill’s senior year, Gregg Mace, the late Sports Director at abc27 in Harrisburg, noticed the work Grill had posted to social media. He reached out to offer her an internship in producing a high school football show. It proved to be her foot in the door of the professional sportscasting world and allowed her to build a robust sportscasting portfolio.
“Gregg really took her under his wing and mentored her a lot,” Schiffman says.
Saying yes to opportunity
After an internship where she created content for the Hershey Bears hockey team, then college graduation, Grill moved into a sports reporter and anchor position in Hagerstown, Maryland, and then a sports anchor post in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was surprised to learn along the way that no one cared that she hadn’t attended a large broadcasting school. Succeeding in the field was much more about building relationships and creating quality content.
“York College was great because it was smaller, and the professors could focus more on the individual. If I had gone to a Penn State or larger school, I don’t think I would have had an opportunity like meeting Jeff Schiffman,” she says. “There’s more opportunity at a school like York because it’s more intimate.”
Those relationships during college didn’t always help her advance quite as quickly as she had hoped. Before taking the job in Hagerstown, Grill learned that abc27 had an opening. But Mace told her that while she was good enough to work in a top 50 market such as Harrisburg, he wasn’t going to hire her. He explained that because of her lack of experience, she still had a lot of mistakes to make, and he didn’t want her to go through that stage of her career in such a big market so close to her hometown.
“Gregg was so right about everything,” Grill says. “I moved to Hagerstown and I made mistakes, and I was so glad they weren’t in a big market where everyone was watching. I’m so grateful for that.”
When another opportunity arose to head a sports department in Washington, D.C., Grill hesitated. She was only 24 with just a few years of professional experience. Recalling the voices of her mentors, Grill turned down the job.
Her faith also played a role in that decision. A devout Catholic, Grill was reminded of a verse in the Bible about how one can’t serve both God and money. She took the words to heart and accepted a sports anchor position with lower pay in smaller-market Charlotte, where she felt prepared to give it her all.
“It was the best jump of my life,” she says. “I messed up and had growing pains, but I made lifelong friends and learned so much.”
Connecting fans and athletes
Two years into her North Carolina stint, Grill learned that another mentor from her Hagerstown days, Mark Viviano, the Sports Director at WJZ in Baltimore, was retiring. He contacted Grill and told her he thought she would be the perfect replacement.
“I was crushed because I always wanted to work with Mark, but I was also so incredibly flattered and honored,” Grill says.
Mace, who never missed an Orioles opening day game, had died of cancer a couple of years earlier. Working for WJZ as a sports anchor would have been his dream job. To Grill, the opportunity felt like a way to honor her former mentor. Grill began working as a sports anchor for WJZ in November 2024 and dove headfirst into a market known for its fanatic Ravens and Orioles fans.
She brought not only her love of sports and statistics but her passion for telling the deeper stories of the men and women on the field. She had long been enamored with professional athletes, not only as players but as people. Getting to know the players better and highlighting their work in the community are among her favorite parts of the job.
When a player drops a ball or misses a catch, some fans are quick to dismiss their talents and call for them to be pulled from the game. Grill strives to help her viewers remember the humanity of the athletes and their love of and dedication to the cities in which they play.
“I want to be that connector to help fans to feel connected and athletes to feel heard,” she says.
Being open to feedback
Grill’s goal is to never let the story be about her. Throughout her career, she’s seen many people get into sportscasting because they want to be on television. She tries to take herself out of the picture when she can and focus on the stories of those about whom she’s reporting.
That humility also has helped her develop a network of mentors in the field, most of them men who are seasoned veterans of sports broadcasting. In a world where men often are afraid to offer advice to their female counterparts or say something that might be misconstrued and lead to the loss of a job, Grill has been eager to get her colleagues’ feedback and to seek out mentors.
“You need to leave your ego at the door,” she says. “If you really, truly want to be good and to advance, you need to be able to take brutal honesty.”
That mentality has quickly taken Grill far in her career. She’s not sure what’s next, though she looks forward to eventually starting a family while continuing to explore opportunities in the sports broadcasting world.
Grill doesn’t let her professional ambition keep her from enjoying life’s simple pleasures, such as having friends over for dinner, exploring her faith, and, of course, savoring an evening under the lights at Camden Yards, watching Orioles baseball.
“I love what I do, and it’s a fun and exciting job, but there’s a lot more to life,” she says. “This is not my end-all. I’m not in it to make it to the top, but if I do, that’s wonderful.”
