Sports Broadcaster Anish Shroff ’04 Hopes to Inspire Future Generations of South Asian Sportscasters

Anish Shroff ’04 happens to be the only minority radio play-by-play voice of a National Football League (NFL) team. It’s not something the veteran sportscaster embraces, but it’s a trend that seems to be shifting.

Eternally proud of his South Asian heritage, Shroff readily admits a sense of pride when he looks around the sportscasting landscape and sees a plethora of talented South Asian broadcasters working for ESPN, MLB Network, Fox Sports, TNT and other national media outlets.

It’s a change that has been a long time coming. Growing up, Shroff remembers watching his beloved New York Yankees and other professional sports games on television … and not seeing anyone who looked like him calling the games. That’s because the industry was dominated by white men.

Shroff’s parents immigrated to the United States from India as first-generation Americans. His parents—Hitesh and Nikita—arrived in New York City in 1972, at the time George Steinbrenner’s Yankees were embarking on a great run of success in the 1970s.

Hitesh came to America to earn a college degree in accounting, but he never worked a day in his life as an accountant. Rather, his passion was photography, and he carved out a 40-year career as a successful photographer before retiring.

Pursuing passions was something Nikita and Hitesh emphasized to their baseball-crazy son. By the time Anish was in the fifth grade he was an avid baseball player, a rabid collector of sports trading cards and read the Newark Star-Ledger sports section cover-to-cover.

When it came time to decide on a career, Anish opted to study broadcast journalism in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. A talented student broadcaster for WAER-FM, Shroff found himself calling Orange games on one of the country’s most prestigious radio stations.