Amstutz’s Fox Sports leadership is all about the future

More than 100 girls may have been giddy getting out of class on a recent Friday morning at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, but as they were escorted over to the main auditorium, most weren’t sure why they were singled out from all the boys for a special presentation.

And the woman at the front by the stage wasn’t one of their usual teachers.

“Let’s build a team for Fox Sports West 2028,” Lindsay Amstutz declared.

The senior vice president and general manager of the Fox Sports West/Prime Ticket and Fox Sports San Diego regional sports networks could actually make this happen. She had a Power Point presentation and the power of channeling dreams to prove it.

“Jobs in sports (that you might not know about)” were words on a slide up on the screen. Amstutz asked if anyone in the room knew about careers in the sports TV business.

“Can you do a push-up?” Amstutz asked. “You can be a camera operator.”

The photo on the screen showed a woman running a camera. One girl shot her hand up, announced her name and came up to the stage.

“We need a graphics artist …Who can make movies on their phone?” Amstutz continued.

“Is anyone good at math? We need a statistician. … Social media? Yup, that’s a job.”

“Who likes to plan parties and figure out where everything goes? That’s our operations manager.”

Within a few minutes of seeing screen shots of women working all those jobs, Amstutz had called up almost two dozen volunteers. The girls who have been exposed to STEAM school curriculum were connecting their basic knowledge with their genuine curiosity.

“And why do you to you want to be the producer again?” Amstutz asked one student she had picked.

“I’ll do it,” she replied, “because I want to try something new.”

Building a foundation

As of October, when she was promoted from her role of director of marketing at FSW/PT/FSSD as well as the entire 22 affiliate Fox Sports Regional network, Amstutz’s ambitious drive as a leader in one the country’s largest TV markets has been about creating and facilitating what’s next.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed.

This Wednesday at the CAA World Congress of Sports at LA Live, Amstutz will be recognized by the Sports Business Journal as one of the “Forty Under 40” who are among the industry’s “best and brightest.” In June, Amstutz goes to New York to be one of three nationally recognized as the Women In Sports and Events annual awards.

“It means the world to me knowing that colleagues are the ones who nominate for these,” Amstutz said from her downtown L.A. office this week. “The sports industry is a tight-knit community, and that enough of them thought this highly of me makes it neat and encouraging for the future.”

With a dry wit and soft-spoken approach that allows her actions to speak even louder, Amstutz stands out simply because she’s one of only two women leading a sports regional network — Andrea Greenberg of Madison Square Garden Network is the other.

“Lindsay is everything you want in a leader – smart, hard-working, gets along with everyone, innovative and always willing to help,” said Kathy Schloessman, the president of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission.

“She got to the position because the Fox executives realized how good she is and what a find they had and how lucky they were to already have her.”

Aside from planting seeds to cultivate future stakeholders in L.A. sports production, Amstutz’s impact has come from three years of helping to launch the Women of Fox Sports group to better connect women in the TV field to those men who’ve traditionally been making all the important decisions. The first WFS breakfast meeting drew more than 100 participants.

“We might have underestimated the need and de6sire for this at first,” said Amstutz, who worked in marketing at Santa Clara University, the NBA offices in New York and then with the WNBA’s Sparks before moving into this position at Fox.

“It was first about building a community and now it’s watching how we can influence the business. We know we need more women in sales and production, for example. With this program, we can bring them in front of people like (Fox Sports president and L.A.-based) Eric Shanks and (RSN chief) Jeff Krolik and start the discussion.”

Adds Schloessman: “While there may be more women in sports leadership roles now than before, there still aren’t a lot. But I think Lindsay and I both feel that it’s not just about helping women but about helping young professionals move up the ranks and being there as a mentor when they need it.”

Back to the middle

As Amstutz told the middle schoolers, now is the time to make friends and influence people.

She had a first-person experience about what would be known as networking – she sat in her home room at Porter Avenue Middle School in Granada Hills next to a kid named Ilan Ben-Hanan.

“It was alphabetical order – I’m the ‘A’ and he’s the ‘B,’” Amstutz said.

Who could have known that Amstutz would be where she is today and Ben-Hanan would become ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions after going to USC?

“It’s funny how life goes,” said Ben-Hanan, living in Manhattan Beach and recognized last year in the “Forty Under 40” ceremony. “What she’s been able to accomplish is incredible, but not surprising knowing her as long as I have. She has always had the spirit, attitude and ability to see something that should be done different or better, and then she does something about it. It takes a special person to decide to get it done. She deserves all of this attention and more.”

The main reason why Amstutz was invited to Mulholland Middle School that day was because a teacher there remembered her from a time when he worked at the Mason Park Rec Center in Chatsworth. She was in high school and showed up one day asking why she they didn’t have a girls’ basketball league.

The director invited her to play in the boys’ league. She declined but persisted. She was told if she got a list of girls together, they’d do a league for girls. She did it – 40 names strong – so it happened.

“I was babysitting at the time and knew a lot of girls in the 9-to-12 age range who wanted to play,” said Amstutz, who then sent out flyers, created a newsletter and organized an all-star game. “I’m kind of just doing the same kind of thing now.”

The effects of Title IX more than 40 years ago continue to give girls access not just to playing sports, but to becoming seen on TV and having a new field to consider.

“I didn’t know any of this growing up,” said Amstutz, who thought of herself more as a dancer who wanted to join drill team in high school. “Right now, a majority of the women interested in production want to be on-air. And I’m not here to crush those dreams, but if that’s your passion, absolutely go for it. But if that doesn’t work out, look at how many opportunities there are to be part of the story-telling process.

“I hope we get to a point in the future where the dynamic shifts and we grow the women in the industry. But until then, there’s a lot of work to keep doing.”

The education continues

After Amstutz explained to the middle-school girls how she grew up going to Monroe High in Van Nuys, lives in Pasadena with her husband and two small children, and did some trailblazing things at Stanford (degrees in political science and communications with a minor in economics) and Georgetown (a law degree), a question-and-answer session came afterward.

“Are you a feminist?” one student asked.

“I am,” Amstutz said after a measured pause. “That’s a great question. What do you think that means?”

“It means you’re dedicated to girls and boys having equality,” came the reply.

Amstutz followed up: “I already know my (1-year-old) daughter (Chloe) is fierce and she has fire in her. But with my (3 ½-year-old) son (Travis), I want him to have an equal opportunity too and be respectful to women, to also stand up for women’s rights.”

The girls applauded.

“Wasn’t that interesting?” Amstutz said of that reaction back at her office. “It’s not like that question was out of line, but it caught me by surprise. They knew that concept. And they had a positive feeling about it.”

Even more so after Amstutz’s visit.

Measuring media mayhem

What smokes

* This edition of NBCSN’s coverage of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach (Sunday, 1:40 p.m.) becomes special for race analyst Paul Tracy – it’s the 25th anniversary of his first win at the circuit, which was also his first major career victory. The four-time Long Beach champ (also in 2000, ’03 and ’04) says “it blows me away” thinking it happened so long ago, but laughs as he recalls coming in as a 24-year-old rookie still upset that he frittered away a win the previous week in Phoenix. He and a friend went to vent riding go-carts in Riverside that next Tuesday, and Tracy ended up flipping end over end and arrived to a Long Beach press conference a couple days later looking battered and bruised. He told everyone he fell off his mountain bike. “I was beat to (bleep) and knew I had to make something happen,” Tracy said this week. “I took the pole, led most of it, had a flat tire near the middle that that put me off-sequence (for pitting) and ended up winning by 10 seconds. Afterward, everyone’s happy, I see Roger (Penske, team owner), and he says, ‘Great race, now stay off those mountain bikes.’” Tracy calls Long Beach “the most important race of the year for IndyCar, other than Indianapolis” and ripe for more attention as the circuit has early momentum compared to NASCAR viewership slumping. NBC, meanwhile, outbid ABC/ESPN to get the rights to all IndyCar racing for three years starting in 2019 – ABC had it for 54 years, and NBCSN’s current deal never allowed races to move to NBC. “We’ve got a ways to go to compare us to NASCAR,” Tracy said, “but it’s a good feeling to see people start to get back into it. Having NBC take eight races next year will be huge for the series and give us all more opportunities. It’s a great partnership.”

What chokes

* Four cable sports channels have endured a decrease in subscriber fees from 2012 to 2017, as a result of a lack of viewership: Tennis Channel, Olympic Channel, beIN Sports and the Pac-12 Network. The latter, which launched in 2012 costing 30 cents a sub, has dipped to just 11 cents (a 63-percent drop), according to the latest data by SNL Kagan and reported by the San Jose Mercury News this week. The issue revolves still around the Pac-12 Net not having a major media partner and getting shut out by DirecTV. There is more that goes into explaining this, but consider a channel like the Big Ten Network has gone from 37 cents to 48 cents per sub, up 30 percent. ESPN has also has gone from $5.04 to $7.54 in that same period.