Recently, Lilian Garcia sat down with WWE and ESPN on-air personality, Charly Caruso, for her latest episode of “Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia”.
Caruso started the interview by sharing how she is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and she is a graduate of American University with a degree in Broadcast Journalism. Charly comes from a very traditional journalism background. She also discusses topics such as dating, working at ESPN, and her time as an investigative reporter.
During her time as an investigative reporter in Charleston, West Virginia, Charly was a one band news reporter, meaning she had to carry her equipment all over by herself.
She talked at lengths about during that time she was exposed to a lot of difficult situations. For example, she had to interview a family about someone that was just murdered at the age of 22. She was stationed in West Virginia for eight months before she relocated to Kansas City, then a live morning reporter with a cameraman.
After two years, her contract was up with the new station in Kansas City, so Charly returned home to cover sports at the local FOX station, in Indianapolis.
When her contract was about to expire, she started to explore other options, and WWE’s SmackDown happen to be in town that day. She happened to be with a friend that was a huge fan of the company, and he had backstage passes.
While she was backstage, Charly recognized Mark Carrano from Total Divas, and she decided to approach him asked if she could pass along her reel. Charly sent it to him, and she didn’t from hear him for a couple of months; the original email did not reach in Carrano.
So, she resends it to Carrano, who liked it and passed it along to Michael Cole, landing an audition with the company. She had an offer on the table but decided to accept a position with The WWE.
Charly also explained her duties at ESPN, since she accepted a part-time position there in September.
“I’m working with ESPN now, as of the end of September. Right now, I’m a part-time employee, so I’m kind of being used more on an as-needed basis. It’s not like I have a set schedule, but am right now hosting their SportsCenter on Snapchat show, which is their social media form of their traditional SportsCenter, which is super fun because it’s super laid back, which kind of has a sarcastic spin to it, which for me is great because I consider myself to have that sense of humor and
be a little comedic, which is cool. I’ve been doing the SportsCenter updates, which air on ESPN throughout the day,” said Caruso.
She added:
“My immediate goal is just to hopefully eventually do more of the Kickoff Show responsibilities. Maybe work with Jonathan Coachman as a co-host, or should he not be available one day, maybe they come to me to say, ‘Hey, we’d love for you to host this pay-per-view kickoff.’ That would be awesome. I do the NXT Kickoff Shows now, which I love doing, but there are so few opportunities because we only have Takeovers four times a year, so to get more practice in the panel scenario would be awesome.
That would be great, and other than that, I’m always open to anything. Should they say, ‘We have a new idea for a WWE Network series or a digital series we think you could be a good fit for,’ there’s no limit to what I would be open to doing.”
You can catch Charly every week, on Monday nights, interviewing Raw Superstars, backstage.
