Even after her third newspaper staff tenure surpassed its two predecessors, Marisa Ingemi thinks outside the cubicle.
She can’t help it. The mode she dubs “freelance brain” served her substantially through her young career’s rougher stretches and got her to where she is now.
As the roving women’s sports reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she rewards sports editor Christina Kahrl’s calculations from the calm before the niche’s tempest in the Bay Area.
According to Kahrl, circa 2022, Stanford women’s basketball was in higher demand among Chronicle readers than the now-former Oakland Athletics. Meanwhile, given the market’s sheer size, it was a matter of time before one or both of the WNBA or NWSL put a team there.
“I’d noticed Marisa as a writer with a breadth of interests and a natural curiosity,” Kahrl said in an email to Awful Announcing. “Those were exactly the kinds of qualities we would need if I was going to cobble together a beat dedicated to women’s sports across the full calendar year.”
To close her second full calendar year at the Chronicle, Ingemi attained a title punctuating the future’s arrival. On January 7, the National Sports Media Association declared her and veteran Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler co-honorees as California’s top sportswriter for 2024.
That makes 15 turns with that title for Ostler, whom Ingemi calls “a legend and an icon.” She said via email to Awful Announcing for her stake in the prize, “This represents more than anything that women’s sports are mainstream, and any newspapers not covering them are missing out on audience, whether it’s growing it or serving their current audience.”
Her own mainstream recognition by the NSMA underscores the way Ingemi’s trophy case is growing. In 2023, she was a finalist for the AP Sports Editors’ inaugural Billie Jean King Award for outstanding women’s sports coverage. That same year, she penned a feature (“Bay Area Derby, where queer skaters are ‘fiercely welcome,’ fights to survive”) that ultimately fetched her the 2024 National Gay and Lesbian Journalism Association’s prize for best sports story.
In a city famous for fog, Ingemi unearths narratives like that by spotting the hidden appeal in ostensibly obscure entities.
“I really view my job as an opportunity to reach larger audiences with stories they didn’t consider before,” she said in an email to AA. “So I look at my stories last year about how pole dancing has been excluded from the mainstream sports conversation and how CTE in women’s sports hasn’t been studied as widely.”
Kahrl was motivated to make this hire because she wanted to stay ahead of local and national trends. At the time, Ingemi was barely five years out of college, but she had a bicoastal background and a range of interests and connections to match.
And then there is all manner of endurance, particularly mental and emotional. Ingemi herself says that part of her rationale for keeping her “freelance brain” plugged in is because “in this industry, we can all lose our jobs at any point.”
Primarily an NHL reporter for her preceding stints at the Boston Herald and the Seattle Times, Ingemi followed her other passions as a garnish to her entrée. In so doing, she garnered additional fans through dispatches on women’s hockey and figure skating in New England, then sitting volleyball and University of Washington athletics in the Pacific Northwest.
But she was barely at the Hub’s tabloid for a year-and-a-half when pandemic-induced layoffs claimed her job in April 2020. Her delayed rebound, which had her covering the Seattle Kraken’s inaugural season in 2021-22, sustained six months of gratification before she was abruptly fired.
AA’s Andrew Bucholtz was among the many vocal commentators who harangued the head-scratching move. He noted the Times’ swelling hockey readership that could only come from a quality of coverage inversely proportional to the expansion team’s shoddy showing on the ice.
Despite that and a wave of petitions to reinstate Ingemi, Times brass was unmoved. Then again, Kahrl was ultimately undeterred by the free agent’s fire-breathing detractors in the web’s dark corners.
“Believe in the talent you see and the people you meet,” she said, “not what gets slung around in social media.”
Not unlike her prior barnstorming stints, Ingemi’s nomadic trek in the winter and spring of 2022 yielded evergreen gems. She singled out her 2021 New York Times piece about backup college lacrosse goalies and her 2022 FiveThirtyEight story on colorblind NHL players as two personal highlights.
Citing Ingemi’s contributions to FiveThirtyEight and the Los Angeles Times, Kahrl said she “saw someone doing cool things as a freelancer, which turned an identified goal and got me thinking about practical possibilities.”
Kahrl’s previous decade at ESPN coincided with the rise of espnW, which she knew the Chronicle needed to match in its own image. “Marisa was exactly the right person to step into it, given her energy and inquisitiveness,” she said.
To date, one of the investment’s top payoffs in Kahrl’s view was Ingemi’s coverage of San Jose State volleyball’s transgender player storyline. National outlets that had previously accepted Ingemi’s freelance ink, such as ESPN and the New York Times, followed her lead when the narrative entered the national eye.
When bringing Ingemi’s trail mix of interests and fortes back under one banner, Kahrl said configuring the budget with her bosses was the only trick. Convincing the candidate felt easy.
On top of existing programs that the Chronicle would turn her loose on, the prospect of the WNBA expanding to the area sweetened Ingemi’s incentive. “In the back of my mind, the entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been like, ‘Just wait for the WNBA to come, and it’s all going to blow up so much more,’” she said.
This winter, she has already witnessed an eruption in her own profile. To split the NSMA’s California sportswriter crown, Ingemi and Ostler eclipsed their peers at the paper of record plus all other outlets in America’s 10th-largest media market (per My Media Jobs’s 2022-23 rankings). They topped the whole pool covering Greater Los Angeles (No. 2 market), Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto (No. 20), and San Diego (No. 30).
“It is really nice that women’s sports is being considered in the scope of this state,” Ingemi said.
Across all 50, she said, “I hope it inspires more publications to understand that covering women’s and queer athletes is worthwhile and will benefit them.”
Most papers and their digital cousins still lean primarily on stringers or staffers from other specialties wading through a slow news phase. However, Ingemi named three exemplary locations whose media reflect a distinctly built-in affinity for women’s sports.
“There are writers covering the WNBA and college basketball full-time in Hartford and Minnesota and Tennessee,” she noted.
Readers around Hartford-New Haven (MMJ’s No. 34 market) have an appetite for scoops on UConn’s 11-time national champion women’s hoops program. The Hartford Courant’s Emily Adams covers that all winter, plus the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun all summer.
One of UConn’s top national rivals in Knoxville (No. 61) generates headlines by carrying on the legacy of the late Pat Summitt. Likewise, Knoxville News Sentinel beat writer Cora Hall upholds the celebrated Dan Fleser’s standard for Tennessee Volunteers coverage.
And in the Twin Cities (No. 15), the Lynx are arguably the WNBA’s model franchise and are scrutinized (along with Golden Gophers women’s basketball) by the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Kent Youngblood.
Conversely, the Bay Area barely builds its presence and visibility in those circles. Various Stanford and Cal-Berkeley teams have lent Ingemi ample ink from the start, but the pros were conspicuously absent until the NWSL awarded Bay FC, effective last season.
For Ingemi’s part as the informant, the timing was fortuitous. She first clocked in at the Chronicle in May 2022, one month before Brandi Chastain, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slatton, and Aly Wagner launched the “NWSL to the Bay” campaign.
The next year meant capturing the suspense of the group’s efforts to woo the league. When they prevailed in the spring of 2023, a year of buildup to the opening kick at San Jose’s PayPal Park ensued.
And then 2024 was business as usual with a main course of old-fashioned game-, practice-, and transaction-based beat reportage.
In between, last May 14, the Golden State Valkyries unveiled their identity as the new local WNBA franchise, awarded in December 2023 and raring to tip off this May.
With that, Kahrl’s vision of an all-in women’s sports beat with titanic franchises for it to cover was complete.
“We built it, and then they came,” said Kahrl. “That’s the best kind of kismet.”
And it won’t come at the expense of the establishments Ingemi’s teammates cover or the grassroots entities she tracks with her “freelance brain.”
“I want to make sure all the women’s athletes in the Bay get coverage, and I don’t neglect anything,” said Ingemi. “But the WNBA at this moment, I think, is the most fascinating league to cover.
“It’s as excited as I’ve been in my entire career.”