Joan Ryan
B.S. Journalism 1981 and UFCJC Hall of Fame 2000
Joan Ryan is an award-winning journalist, author and sports media consultant. She was a pioneer in sports journalism as one of the first female sports columnists in the country and covered every major sporting event from the Super Bowl and the World Series to the Olympics and championship fights.
After graduating from UF, she began work as a copy editor at The Orlando Sentinel and became the first woman in the paper’s sports department. In 1985, she moved to San Francisco as a full-time sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and then San Francisco Chronicle in 1994. She has been the senior media advisor to the San Francisco Giants since 2008.
Her sports columns and features earned 13 Associated Press Sports Editors Awards, the National Headliner Award, the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Journalism Award, and the prestigious Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association.
She has written five books, including “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters’’ (1995), which was a ground-breaking expose named one of the “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time’’ by Sports Illustrated and one of the “Top 50 Sports Books of All Time’’ by The Guardian. She has been featured on Oprah, 60 Minutes, Nightline, the Today Show, People, the New Yorker, the New York Times and other media around the country.
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