When Damian Lillard, the point guard for the Portland Trail Blazers, attended a basketball camp with college recruiters after his sophomore year of high school, he was deemed a player who couldn’t shoot off the dribble.
He talks about that during a new digital show with Bleacher Report’s Taylor Rooks, published to YouTube on Apr. 10. Two weeks later, on Apr. 23, Lillard sunk a deep three-pointer at the buzzer in game five during a series against the Oklahoma City Thunder, pushing the Blazers to a series win. (The Blazers are currently tied 3-3 with the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference semifinals.)
For Rooks, who has carved out a successful career as a sports reporter at the age of 26, Lillard’s buzzer-beater has been one of the early highlights of her new show on Bleacher Report. In Take it There with Taylor Rooks, the Georgia native and Falcons superfan aims to personalize athletes away from the field of play. Lillard’s candid chat about being underrated, followed by that shot, is a demonstration of how she aims to peel back the layers of each athlete’s story.
“A lot of things he discussed in the interview came out in that moment—all these critiques manifested,” said Rooks this week over the phone. “We spoke to him before he had this major moment in the NBA. And now it’s a marquee interview for him, something they’ll point to when discussing his personality and what he’s like.”
Lillard is part of an all-star lineup of athletes appearing on Rooks’ inaugural season. Her first episode featured Philadelphia 76ers’ Jimmy Butler. Lillard appeared in episode two. Saquon Barkley of the NFL’s New York Giants, who won NFL Rookie of the Year in 2018, talked about how he believes he will become the game’s best-ever running back in episode three. Rooks traveled to Utah to interview Jazz center Rudy Gobert for episode four a few weeks after he broke the NBA single-season dunk record.
“I’m happy with the show so far,” Rooks said. “We’ve been having deep, introspective and personal conversations with these athletes. It’s more of a people show than a sports show and after watching you get a better idea of who the athletes are.”
Rooks is known to push athletes beyond their comfort zone in interview settings. She travels to their homes or cities, where she finds they’re more willing to open up, and she encourages introspection by asking personal questions—“When is the last time something hurt your feelings?” She hopes to paint a visual picture for viewers by leading athletes into descriptive answers. In one line of questioning she often asks them to take her to a specific moment in time.
Her efforts are a nod to a shifting media landscape, where sports content has evolved from just scores and recaps to personalizing athletes and telling stories about the cultural aspects of sport.
“I like the way sports media has shifted because people are realizing sports are just a microcosm of everything else that happens in the world,” Rooks said. “When things are happening socially or politically, sports are the very syndicate of those movements. Once we realize sports is a societal thing and that a lot of things we care about occur in sport, there’s a lot of ways to expand how we view it.”
Rooks carved out a career telling sports stories and breaking sports news while still pursuing her undergraduate degree in broadcast journalism at the University of Illinois. She comes from a family of athletes and sports fans. Among them are Marv Woodson, who played six years in the NFL as a safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers and New Orleans Saints, and St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Lou Brock.
Having sports in her blood and the ambition to tell stories since she was a teenager has helped her to stand out in a competitive sports journalism space. She entered college with sports broadcast as her goal and pursued it unwaveringly during her college career. Rooks interned with the PGA Tour during her sophomore year, and worked for FOXSports.com in her junior and senior years.
“I made the decision to attack that when I was a freshman,” she said. “I had to figure out what would separate me from the millions of other people who want to be in sports. One way to do that was to create a blog, create my own content. But my biggest advantage is that I knew what I wanted to do and I stuck with it. You really are so ahead of the curve if you know early.”
Her resumé includes stints writing about football and basketball recruiting for Scout.com, hosting a sports podcast for SportsNet New York, where she interviewed such stars as Kevin Durant and Snoop Dogg, serving as a correspondent for the Big Ten Network, and working as a sideline reporter for CBS Sports.
Now at Bleacher Report, she’s center stage in front of the camera. The media organization has been expanding its style of storytelling over the past year to appeal to a wider audience of next-generation fans, including women. The company if making a big push, for example, around the Women’s World Cup next month. And Take it There with Taylor Rooks is one of just a few Bleacher Report shows built specifically around a personality (the others being House of Highlights with Omar Raja and The Lefkoe Show).
Rooks is fearless when talking about issues outside of sports. With a large social media following of 105,000 on Twitter and nearly 240,000 on Instagram, she regularly discusses her experience as a woman and a minority. She sees her success as a way to elevate equality in both society and the workplace.
“Anytime you have a voice in any space, especially the media space, you have a responsibility to make sure that every single voice is heard, especially the voices you represent,” Rooks said. “It’s sad that me talking about it is considered a hot button issue because to me it isn’t politics to say that everyone is equal—it’s the right thing to do. There are a lot of injustices around people of color and women and I don’t think anyone should be silent around those things. The way I feel about it should be the default feeling. And when you stray from that, you should be an outlier.”
When asked what kind of advice she’d give to the minorities and young women she now represents on the public stage, Rooks said that the best thing to do is to live passionately and remember that life is of one’s own creation.
“Just have a good idea of what makes you happy and what you can do in the world to reflect that,” she said. “Something I wish I had heard earlier, that I understand a lot now, is that nobody can define who you are. That’s the choice you get to make every single day: the type of person you want to be. You have complete control over you and who you want to be and where you want to go.”
“Anyone who tells you any differently is wrong.”