Former Atlanta media personality Elle Duncan has landed a coveted anchor spot at 6 p.m. on ESPN’s ‘SportsCenter” starting in February.
She is also scheduled to have her second baby today, according to her Twitter feed.
Duncan has been co-anchoring the noon edition of “SportsCenter.” She will join Kevin Negandhi at 6 p.m. when she returns from maternity leave.
She started her media career in Atlanta with the 2 Live Stews on 790/The Zone. She then spent eight years with V-103, where she worked with both Ryan Cameron and Frank Ski and had her own midday show. She also spent two years at 11Alive as a traffic reporter as a conduit to what she really wanted to do: TV sports.
She left Atlanta in 2013 for the New England Sports Network, then joined ESPN in April 2016. That same year, she married Omar Abdul Ali, a computer engineer, and had her first child in 2018 after 36 hours of labor.
“It was harrowing, but she ended up fine,” Duncan said in an interview last year with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution when the Super Bowl was in Atlanta.
At ESPN, Duncan swaps places with Sage Steele.
According to a story in Deadspin, Steele told The Wall Street Journal that two of her fellow Black colleagues, Duncan and Michael Eaves, allegedly prevented her from participating in a special in June called “Time for Change: We Won’t Be Defeated,” exploring Black athletes’ experiences with injustice.
“I found it sad for all of us that any human beings should be allowed to define someone’s ‘Blackness,’” Steele told the newspaper. “Growing up biracial in America with a Black father and a white mother, I have felt the inequities that many, if not all Black and biracial people have felt — being called a monkey, the ‘n’ word, having ape sounds made as I walked by — words and actions that all of us know sting forever. Most importantly, trying to define who is and isn’t Black enough goes against everything we are fighting for in this country and only creates more of a divide.”
Duncan at the time did not respond to this allegation.
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