Heading into her sophomore season as host of ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown,” SAM PONDER remains just as excited about the start of the NFL season as any fanatic out there. “It has kind of that back-to-school feel you got as a kid, where you know there’s a lot of work that’s coming,” Ponder said. “Maybe some of that isn’t as exciting, but that initial feeling where things are about to get going, it’s great and it’s going to be a fun season for sure.” Ponder, who calls both Phoenix and N.Y. home, took some time ahead of Week 1 to speak with THE DAILY about her second go-around on “Countdown” and what downtime with the Ponder family is like these days.
LEARNING CURVES: I was always taught to be quick to listen and slow to speak, but this last year, I really put it into practice. For me, it was more off camera. I was with a whole new crew and they were new to each other in a lot of ways. REX RYAN was new to the (ESPN) group, so there was a whole lot of getting to know each other, and for me, just humbling myself and sitting back and listening to people. CHRIS BERMAN had been doing this for 31 years before I took over, so there was so much knowledge and experience that I was able to take little things from it. At some point, after you’ve put in the time to listen to everyone that does have the experience, there’s a time where it’s your chance to speak up. We’ve got a year under our belt. Now it’s time to take the things that we’ve learned and speak up and use my voice a little bit more.
GEARING UP FOR OPENING WEEKEND: Friday night is my favorite, because that’s date night at our house. The kids go over to Grandma’s and CHRISTIAN and I go out, grab some dinner and when we’re in New York, we’ll pick a part of town that’s just fun to walk around and explore, like Tribeca or Soho. We’ll go to bed super early because as I’ve learned with working in TV especially, sleep is everything. The ability to be well-rested so that your mind is as sharp as it can be is so important. Saturdays, I’m a college football junkie -- and always will be -- so if we’re on the West Coast, we wake up and college football is already on. If we’re in New York, I’ll have some coffee waiting for games to start and work on our “Countdown” rundown for the next day. I’ll head up to Bristol Saturday evening to have dinner with the guys and go over some last minute changes based off of whatever the NFL news was that day. The news is ever-changing, so sometimes we’ll put new stuff in right before the show because everything happens so quickly in the NFL these days. The nice thing is I’ll be able to sleep in a little bit this year and be into the studio by 7:30am.
PASTIMES WITH THE PONDERS: There’s never much leisure time when we’ve got three kids under the age of four, that’s a fact of life for me these days. One thing we are learning to do, because our kids are so little and we don’t want to be those people that just sit inside and watch cartoons all Saturday long, is just having our kids participate in things we’re already interested in. On a normal Saturday where I don’t have work, we’re going to spend a lot of the day out by the pool, or if we’re in New York, we like to go on long walks through Central Park. Anything we can do to reduce the amount of time we’re looking at our phones or our kids are in front of screens is a good thing so we try and just get out. It helps to free up the mind, but also get to know each other and have conversations with our kids that just happen naturally when you’re playing outside, riding bikes or anything like that.
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