Lady nabs NBA job she’s dreamed of since age 11

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Eight short months ago, Ashley ShahAhmadi was covering high school baseball games and track meets at the local ABC affiliate in Jackson, Miss. — and desperately working on an exit strategy.

At 26, after four years of working small ones, she had to land a bigger job soon, she’d decided — or move back home to Georgia, in with her mother and younger brother, and start over.

Then in May, Atlantabased Fox Sports South hired her as a digital host and producer. Four months later, she was tapped to host pre- and post-game coverage of Hornets home games. And in December, longtime Hornets sideline reporter/ analyst Stephanie Ready announced she was leaving.

And there it was: Her dream job, open. She’d been imagining this — not kind of this, not sort of this, but exactly this — ever since she was in the seventh grade. But was she ready?

‘That has to be the coolest job’

In case you’re

wondering, she pronounces ShahAhmadi so it rhymes with comedy: “SHAH-meh-dee.”

(For the record, though, the traditional way to say her last name is “Shah-AHK-mehdee,” with a throat-clearing ‘kh’ sound. “I just Americanized it to make it easier,” she says.)

Her father, a native of Iran, emigrated to the United States when he was 14 and grew up to marry Cheryl Rebischke of Saint Cloud, Minn. Ashley, the middle of their three children, was born two years after her brother Aryon and seven years before her brother Brandon. She learned a bit of Persian from her grandmother, but otherwise, there wasn’t much Iranian influence on her life; if the family went to religious services, it was to Catholic church on Christmas and Easter.

It’s always been a tall family — Ashley, Aryon and Brandon are 5-10, 6-3 and 6-6, respectively — and they’ve always been basketball fans. But Ashley was the one who took the game most seriously.

Although she developed into a shot-blocking force as a forward at Marietta’s Kell High School, she calls a middleschool game — in which she scored half of her team’s points — her most memorable moment as a player.

And it was an NBA game she attended as a middle-schooler that was the seminal moment in her life, she says.

She was in seventh grade, with the whole family at an Atlanta Hawks game (her first), in great seats, thanks to a work connection of her dad’s. So it was easy for ShahAhmadi to spot the sharply dressed woman holding the microphone up to the Hawks’ head coach courtside.

“In my head, I was like, ‘That has to be the coolest job ever.’”

Cheryl ShahAhmadi remembers it like this: “Ashley goes, ‘Mom, that is what I want to do. I want to be a sideline reporter in the NBA.’”

Cheryl didn’t think much of it at the time.

Yet, she says, Ashley stayed steadfastly focused on the dream — through her father walking out her freshman year of high school; through Cheryl’s struggle to raise three kids, paycheck to paycheck, as a waitress who worked nights and weekends; through Ashley working at Chick-Fil-A all through high school and college to help pay her tuition at the University of Georgia’s broadcast journalism school.

And in 2014, ShahAhmadi graduated and started looking for work. The first job she landed covering sports was in Meridian, Miss. — a city whose entire population wouldn’t fill up Spectrum Center (where the Hornets play) twice.

It’s about as far away from an NBA sideline as a sports journalist could get.

Starting at the bottom

But, she says, it was a fantastic opportunity for a newly minted college graduate. At WTOK-TV, she was on-air five nights a week, anchoring the 6 and 10 o’clock sports reports, and got to cover college teams at Alabama, Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Southern Miss (plus a fair amount of high school sports).

The pay and the schedule were not so fantastic.

Her salary was $22,000 a year, and while $22,000 stretches a lot farther in Meridian, Miss., than it does in Atlanta or Charlotte, it still wound up stretching ShahAhmadi pretty thin. And with working late most nights, Monday and Tuesday as days off, and little vacation time, she rarely drove the 4-1/2 hours home to see the family.

She lived like this for two years. Then: another job in Mississippi — and another two years. In 2016, she made it to a bigger market, Jackson, Miss., but now it was six hours home and … she’d about had it.

Near her contract renewal date this spring, ShahAhmadi made her daily call to her mother, and unsuccessfully fought back tears. “I just kind of feel like I’ve plateaued here,” she told her mom. There was nowhere higher to go in Mississippi. She was stuck. ‘Literally jumping for joy’ She wasn’t going to settle for anything, she says: She really was prepared to move back home while she kept looking.