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Prim in Her Prime
6/15/2015 9:00:00 AM | Women's Tennis
By Jim Sumner
Prim Siripipat worked and sweated for years in pursuit of her dream of tennis stardom. When the dream fell apart, the 2003 Duke graduate took a deep breath and re-invented herself as a television broadcaster who is now one of ESPN's rising stars.
Siripipat was born in 1981 in Mexico, Missouri. Her parents Pallop and Ampai were natives of Thailand who had relocated to Missouri after earning advanced degrees at the University of Oklahoma. Father Pallop was a physician, while Ampai earned a doctorate in education.
Siripipat took up tennis at age seven. Both parents played, as did five-years-older brother Nick. She says playing against older family members enabled her to improve quickly. Within a few years she was defeating her instructors and even local high school players.
She quickly outgrew the local competition. Siripipat and her mother moved to Tampa, Fla., when Prim was 12; her father and brother stayed in Missouri. She attended a public school and worked on her game at Saddlebrook Academy, where her peers included Andy Roddick and Jennifer Capriati.
“Excited, really nervous, homesick,” Siripipat says of those days. “It was a big adjustment, a huge transition. I was the new kid on the block. It ended up being a good experience. I learned to adjust, to toughen up, to treat people with respect.”
Her game thrived. She won tournaments, toured with national teams and became nationally ranked in her age group. Stardom beckoned.
But education wasn't just an abstract concept in the Siripipat family. Her parents cautioned her against putting all her eggs in the tennis basket. She decided to forego the pro tour and play at the collegiate level.
Duke, Harvard, UCLA, Vanderbilt and William & Mary were her final choices. Like so many prep student-athletes, she was sold by Duke's combination of athletics and academics, facilities and people.
She joined a tennis powerhouse. Duke was a nationally-competitive program that made the NCAA Tournament each of her four years on the team and captured the 2000, 2001 and 2003 ACC titles. She compiled a 28-11 singles record as a freshman in 2000. Her victories at No. 6 singles helped Duke to NCAA Tournament wins over Winthrop and Arkansas. Through her first three seasons, her ACC singles mark stood at 17-2.
But her body began to betray her. A rotator cuff injury made serving painful and both knees were sore. She decided to have three surgeries in short order in the summer of 2001 in order to reduce her time off the court.
“I tried to come back but I kept getting other injuries,” she recalls. “I had been a scrappy, fast, hard-hitting player but my body kept falling apart. It was an eye-opening experience. I realized my body just couldn't go anymore.”
She became a doubles player and teamed with Katie Granson for two wins in the 2002 NCAA Tournament.
Siripipat's physical issues did not carry over to the classroom. She made the ACC Honor Roll all four years, majoring in sociology with a minor in biological anthropology and a certificate in markets and management.
Professional tennis was off the table but she had lots of post-graduate options. Medical school, law school, perhaps an MBA. She had positioned herself well.
But she chose the path less traveled. Siripipat knew she wanted to stay close to sports. Long-time Duke team physician and Hall of Famer Dr. Frank Bassett suggested she look at broadcasting and she liked the sound of that. She approached Duke women's tennis sports information director Lindy Brown.
“My first thought was that I wished she had asked me three years earlier,” Brown recalls. “But she had such a good personality that we were able to hook her up with a couple of local TV stations. Every place she went to, she impressed so many people. She was willing to do whatever it took.”
Siripipat spent some time shadowing Linda Cohn at ESPN before earning an internship at Raleigh television station WRAL.
Siripipat says that gave her a “foot in the door” and that was all she needed. Like the seven-year-old tennis player she had been only 15 years earlier, she was a quick learner who loved what she was doing.
There were some bumps in the road. After a stint on camera for a Raleigh cable station, she moved to Miami, where she was a TV sportscaster for the CBS affiliate. She lost that job in 2010 — she remembers it as St. Patrick's Day — when a series of cost-cutting layoffs left her jobless.
Siripipat says the layoff would “make me or break me.”
It made her.
Her agent sent a tape to ESPN and they liked what they saw. She paid for a flight to Connecticut for the first of two interviews and was hired almost exactly a year after being laid off in Miami.
She hit the ground running. “They want us to do a little of everything,” she says of her employer — and she may be understating the job description. She's been a tennis sideline analyst, an anchor, a host, a video editor, a fantasy football expert; she works on radio, TV and the ESPN website and has more than 18,000 twitter followers. “Every single day is completely different,” she says.
ESPN executive Laura Gentile also is a former Duke athlete, a 1994 grad who was named to the ACC's 50th anniversary field hockey team. She says she and Siripipat bonded quickly over their common experiences. But Gentile says she just as quickly recognized Siripipat as “outgoing, aggressive and eager.”
Siripipat's most visible current role might be her Saturday radio show “Spain and Prim,” co-hosted by Siripipat and former Cornell athlete Sarah Spain. It broadcasts at noon.
“There's not a lot of diversity out there,” Siripipat says of what is one of the first national sports radio shows both produced and hosted by women. “I'm not sure I'm a pioneer. It's such a big word. I do know that it is a rarity. It doesn't have to be about gender but rather about breaking down barriers.”
Much of Siripipat's best work ends up on espnW, the network's online platform “for women who love sports.” Gentile is vice-president of espnW. She calls Spain and Prim “really important. Sports radio is still a platform that needs to be populated by more women. It's time to add more voices, to discuss new topics. Prim is an example of a very talented and very knowledgeable woman. She's a great host. She's really good at getting people involved.”
Siripipat is bright, articulate and engaging. But she also has a tough inner core. Early in her broadcasting career she was advised to Anglicize her last name, to cut her hair, to blend in.
She dug in her heels. “Why am I not good enough?” she asked. “This is what I want to do. Judge me not on my looks but judge me on who I am.”
The hair stayed. So did the name.
Siripipat says there's a lesson there. “It's okay to go against the grain. It's okay to go against the mainstream.”
She doesn't get back to Duke as often as she would like, but her affection is obvious. “Duke is very special, very supportive,” she says. “Duke gave me all sorts of skills to pursue my dreams.”
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