Sean McDonough wins NSMA Sportscaster of the Year in Greensboro

Greensboro spent the weekend hosting one of sports media’s most tightly watched gatherings, and the marquee honor went to ESPN’s Sean McDonough. He won the 2025 National Sportscaster of the Year award from the National Sports Media Association, the first national NSMA award of his career, during the group’s 66th awards weekend and national convention at Grandover Resort & Spa.

The two-day event ran June 28 and 29 at the 1000 Club Rd. hotel in Greensboro and drew the association’s annual mix of state and national winners, including 2025 sportscasters and sportswriters from 49 states plus Washington, D.C. The awards banquet was set to begin promptly at 6 p.m. June 29, giving Guilford County a tightly packed convention schedule that brought media figures, guests and honorees through one of the county’s best-known hospitality properties.

The weekend also carried a broader branding value for Greensboro. Alongside the individual awards, the NSMA honored Hall of Fame inductees James Brown of CBS, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Greg Gumbel of CBS and Sid Hartman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The program also included the Sports Media Convergence Summit, adding another layer to the convention beyond the banquet itself and deepening the city’s pitch as a place that can host sports-industry meetings, not just games.

The association’s voting structure gives the awards a built-in calendar that helps explain why the event functions as a national draw. NSMA members nominate candidates from Oct. 15 through Nov. 15, the top vote-getters advance to a final ballot, and final ballots are emailed Dec. 1 for voting through Dec. 31. That process feeds a year-end cycle that culminates in the Greensboro convention each spring, concentrating attention, travel and overnight stays around a single host city.

Mark Rodgers joined the list of honorees in Greensboro, taking the 2025 NSMA Oklahoma Sportscaster of the Year award. Rodgers has spent more than 30 years delivering sports analysis in Oklahoma, with a long emphasis on high school football and basketball. His recognition, paired with McDonough’s first national NSMA win, gave the Greensboro banquet a mix of national reach and state-level depth that fit the association’s voting format and its convention model.

For Greensboro and Guilford County, the weekend offered more than a trophy presentation. It showed how a headquarters hotel, a banquet and a national convention can turn a ceremonial stop into a repeatable visitor-economy play, if the city keeps landing events that bring in guests with time to spend in local hotels and restaurants.