Its ridiculous, really, given her beginnings as a reluctant footy watcher, her unremarkable sporting record and the fact that she holds degrees in Politics and French. A Quill award winner in 2010, and the AFL Players Associations football writer of the year in 2007, Sam began covering AFL while studying at Melbourne University and now appears across all media- print, television, radio, and online.
She has a knack of balancing the serious with the irreverent, and on any given day is as likely to be writing hard-hitting front page news as an insightful, heart-felt feature story. Sam has covered major sporting events for the Fairfax group including the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth games, Australian Open tennis grand slams and the spring racing.
As well as covering AFL, she is The Ages cycling reporter and was recognised for her coverage of the sport at the 2009 Cycling Australia Awards. Looking for a start in journalism while she was still a student, and inspired by a love of Carlton that didnt hit until she was a teenager, Sam wrote to the editor of the clubs quarterly magazine and convinced him to take on a teenage casual writer. It led to a job at afl.com.au and eventually The Age.
In 2003 Sam was offered the position of newshound on a new Saturday night footy program called After the Game. The following year, when it was reborn as Before the Game she became a full-time panel member joining Peter Helliar, Dave Hughes and Lehmo. Mick Molloy and Andrew Maher have since jumped aboard to deliver the news and a generous dose of humour every Saturday night during AFL season. The show airs nationally on Channel Ten and is in its ninth year.
Sam loves radio and enjoys being a member of the ABC radios football team, appearing weekly on leading pre-match program The Sunday Inquisition with Gerard Whateley and Stan Alves, and was a long-standing regular on Melbournes much-loved community radio station 3RRR talking about footy and life.
Sam sits on the advisory committee to the Melbourne Vixens board, has been an ambassador for the Basil Sellers Art Prize and Run Melbourne, and has on-going ambassadorial roles for Breast Cancer Network Australia and the Women for Carlton.
