Michigan alum transitions from rowing star to NFL media

NOTE: This feature ran in the March Michigan recruiting issue of The Wolverine magazine. The special issue is 100 pages and profiles every single member of the 2022 football recruiting class in depth. Physical copies can be purchased here while supplies last.

Caroline Hendershot finished her Michigan rowing career with plenty of hardware and accolades. The two-time NCAA medalist and 2019 Big Ten Athlete of the Year came from a family of collegiate athletes, and her star shone the brightest at one of the biggest schools in the country.

Hendershot’s visit to Michigan was one she would never forget. Her story is similar to many with the streets filled with maize and blue on a football game day. The scene in Ann Arbor was unlike anything the family had witnessed before.

“I remember specifically that my mom and dad came on my official visit with me,” she said. “My dad was like a kid in the candy shop. His jaw was open the whole time. He played football at the Naval Academy, so I thought if this is impressing him it speaks volumes.”

Michigan was an easy sell on its own with Mark Rothstein, the only coach in the rowing program’s three-decade history. Hendershot cites his mentorship as not only a driving force behind her athletic success but as someone who genuinely changed her life.

“I don’t think I would be where I am or who I am without a lot of his tutelage and the lessons that he helped me learn,” she said. “Every day I came to row, I learned how capable I was of taking another step. It gave me a lot of confidence over time. He was a big factor in my decision of going to Michigan.”

More hats than just a Michigan rower

Learning how to take the next step and get better every day is also how Hendershot’s career aspirations developed. She graduated with honors with a degree in communications and a focus in digital media. After her freshman year, Hendershot needed an escape from only participating in college athletics and wanted to get more out of her Michigan experience.

She looked into joining clubs on campus and landed on Wolverine Women, an all-female sports talk show on WOLV TV, the university’s student-run television station. It sparked an interest, which led Hendershot to consider what life after college sports looked like. Working in communications with a supportive group of women started her path into media.

“I learned that I loved getting to tell stories,” she said. “Don’t think I had realized that. I was always the one being interviewed and not the one doing the interviewing. When I got to start interviewing some of my peers within the athletic department and learning about what made them tick or what they had to overcome, I loved it. It meant that much more watching them play their sport, knowing the background of what they’ve been through.”

From there, Hendershot found plenty of ways to stay active in the field. She was a front office associate intern with the Hartford Yard Goats, a minor league baseball team, in 2017 and a summer intern with the NBC affiliate in the Boston area in 2018. Hendershot then served as the in-arena host for the Michigan hockey program during the 2018-19 season. Her résumé also includes a two-month internship with Big Ten Network in the summer of 2019, where she learned all operations of a television broadcast truck.

She was selected from a pool of 12 Michigan athletes for a broadcasting immersion with CBS Sports’ Tracy Wolfson, a Michigan alum, in December 2017. This allowed her the opportunity to work in a shadowing role with Wolfson, Tony Romo and Jim Nantz, and she was part of a weekend of NFL broadcasts.

Aside from broadcasting, she served as the marketing and communications chair for the NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee from 2016-19.

She was, and remains, a wearer of many hats.

“When I’m busy, I like to stay busy,” Hendershot said. “And I do my best work when I’m busy. Student-athletes only have so many free hours in the day. So it makes your time more productive if you have scheduled events in each time slot of your day. It was a lot, but I learned something that I think helped me within the other categories I was participating in. 

“Coach Mark helped and knew how important that balance was to me.”

From Michigan to the Worldwide Leader

Hendershot graduated in 2019 with plenty of hands-on experience in several areas. This led to her first full-time job out of college working for ESPN as a content associate. That helped her develop and continue to flex her production experience muscles with one of the biggest brands in sports media.

“Being thrown into ESPN and being held to a high standard reminded me of Michigan in a lot of ways,” she said. “They expected your best across the board in all categories every single day. 

“It helped me maintain that mindset coming out of college thinking you might not be participating in a sport anymore, but you can still bring your best effort to every single day. And I got to meet a ton of great people there. The people at ESPN are the heart and soul of the company.”

Her two-year run also included a large chunk of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created a new and unique challenge for everyone. The pandemic also taught her a new lesson that she learned while working on “Get Up,” ESPN’s daily morning show, with one of the network’s biggest names. 

“We never went off air one day during the pandemic,” Hendershot said. “Other shows took little breaks here and there. ‘Get Up’ was on a normal schedule every single day. 

“[Host] Mike Greenberg had to come into the Connecticut studios instead of the New York offices, which were shut down. I learned so much from watching him put on a whole show by himself alone in a studio, which is so hard to do. I didn’t know it was hard until I watched him do it for months on end. So much learned from him and I got to grow as an individual in that regard, and he became a really big mentor to me.”

Getting the call from an NFL organization

People like Hendershot are always looking to push the boundaries of their skill set and find something new to tackle. For her, that was a team reporter job with the NFL’s New York Jets. She threw a Hail Mary by applying for the gig and got it in November 2021.

Hendershot considers what she does now as a dream position and enjoys feeling like she is part of a team again.

“It has been a whirlwind since I came in,” she said. “I feel like I’ve already grown so much as an individual, but also watching this team grow within the last five weeks of the season. And it was incredible, especially to be a part of a team this season.

“We’re going to bring it every single day. And we’re going to hold ourselves to a high standard and just put our nose to the grindstone. In due time that hard work will pay off. It feels like I have found my people with a culture of hard work being the only way to do things. I can’t wait to get a full 18-week season under my belt. It has been great so far.”

Certain throughlines serve as parallels for a lot of Michigan alums. For Hendershot, the famed “The Team, The Team, The Team” mantra is one that rubbed off and will affect her for the rest of her career.

“There was a sign in our boathouse at Michigan that said, ‘Train to win and win for Michigan,’” Hendershot said. “The idea that you’re going to come in every day and put in every ounce that you have into whatever you’re doing. But you’re not just trying to better yourself, you’re trying to better everyone around you, and you’re trying to bring others along with you. I think that mindset has stuck with me, and I think it will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. 

“I wouldn’t be here without my teammates, and I wouldn’t want to be here without my teammates. When we win, we all win; it doesn’t just need to be your success. It can be your coworker’s success that you celebrate or your boss’ success that you celebrate. Every win is a reflection of the entire group and the entire organization. Michigan prepared me to bring that high standard of expectation to everything that I do. And also to bring along the teammates that you have.”

The Caroline Hendershot File

Michigan Accomplishments: First-team All-American (2019) … Two-time NCAA medalist (bronze, 2017, ‘19 with the 2V8) … Big Ten Athlete of the Year (2019) … First-team All-Big Ten (2019) … Big Ten Distinguished Scholar (2019) … Three-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree (2017, ‘18, ‘19). 

Professional Accomplishments: Full-time content associate at ESPN from 2019-21 … Current team reporter for the NFL’s New York Jets

Michigan Memory: “Winning at Big Tens was the first time we had won it in six years. And we had gone in there being the underdogs. Everybody thought Ohio State was going to pull it off again. I remember our whole team saying, ‘Absolutely not. If it’s the last thing we do, we’re going to win this thing.’ And we kept true to our promise.”

Favorite Spot in Ann Arbor: “I still dream about the food at Jerusalem Garden. And it seems like I haven’t had it in forever and I genuinely made my sister try it with me one time when she visited. Sometimes randomly she’ll text me, ‘Oh man, I was just thinking about the rice [there].’ I miss it so much. I wish I could mail it to myself directly.”

Education: Graduated with honors from College of Literature, Science and the Arts with a degree in communications in 2019.

Family: Carl (father, Navy football), Marian (mother, Fairfield field hockey), Sarah (sister, Princeton rower), Andrew (brother, Holy Cross lacrosse), Erica (sister, Dartmouth track and field).