Start small, go big
FOX Sports host Kaitlyn Vincie proves starting local pays off
FOX Sports reporter Kaitlyn Vincie holds the microphone while reporting from pit road in 2015. Vincie embodies the idea of starting local and early. She started by uploading YouTube videos that she made at home covering races at Langley Speedway in Hampton, Virginia. The NASCAR fandom allowed for her to gain attention, and she caught the eye of FOX Sports.
Every journalist starts off hearing start local and start early as a way to make it to the top. Kaitlyn Vincie, the newest host of NASCAR’s Gander Outdoors Truck Series coverage on FOX Sports, is the perfect example of how this works.
“Working in television is a very specialized industry,” Vincie said. “It takes a very confident kind of self-assured person to get in front of a camera and talk to hundreds of thousands of people and do it in a way that’s eloquent and easy for the viewers to understand.”
Vincie hosts NASCAR RACEDAY on FOX Sports 1 prior to each NGOTS race. She sets up each race with interviews, news, and notes.
“I started in college really planning ahead to do sports journalism,” Vincie said. “I went to my first race when I was in college. I had garage passes for a NASCAR Cup race, and I just fell in love with it then and there.”
Although she did not have much exposure to racing growing up, Vincie began a NASCAR column on the college newspaper after falling in love with the sport.
Three internships and a college graduation later, Vincie saw a posting in a newspaper for a reporter at Langley Speedway in Hampton, Virginia. She worked there for two years, and thus began her NASCAR career.
Vincie promotes starting early. She encourages young journalists to start when and where they can to build up their personal portfolio. While working at Langley Speedway, she bought a green screen, and she practiced every aspect of what went into a broadcast.
She started her own portfolio on YouTube, giving at home race coverage with the green screen. This portfolio allowed her to gain attention among the NASCAR fan base, which ultimately led to her job at FOX.
FOX Sports reporter Kaitlyn Vincie talks to driver Jesse Little while on camera. Vincie started very early covering NASCAR, running a column in her college newspaper covering the races. She got her first job right out of college at Langley Speedway. She first hit the national spotlight at the age of 24.
“It’s a pretty intricate sport,” Vincie said. “There’s a lot of variables that go into it on any given week, [and] it’s always a different race track.”
Having no family ties to the sport, Vincie had to work her way up through motorsports working harder than anyone else around her. As a new face in the crowd, people assumed that she was unaware of everything going on in the sport.
“You don’t always notice it,” Vincie said. “Until there are days where you get ready to walk into the garage area before it’s open and you look around and it’s 400 dudes and you. The racing community is male dominated.”
She started writing a column for her college newspaper and took the first job available right out of college. Vincie started covering NASCAR at the national level at 24 years old, and gaining confidence in herself was a significant hurdle to overcome.
Now in her eighth year with FOX, Vincie has proven herself and earned a spot hosting the pre-race show for the NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series.
“I had people around me who believed in me,” Vincie said. “That’s the most important thing that you can have is your executives or your producers or people who are in your corner helping shape you into the journalist that you know that you can become.”
The first broadcast Vincie hosted was last weekend at Daytona. This Saturday, watch her on NASCAR RACEDAY as she sets up NGOTS racing from Atlanta Motor Speedway. Pre-race coverage begins at 4:30 p.m. on FOX Sports 1.