It's sunny and 75 in Toronto, Canada, this time of year as far as Caroline Szwed is concerned, no matter if the thermometer is actually hovering around zero and her West Virginia rescue dog Cash is barking at each snowflake piling up outside of her apartment window.
You may recall Szwed the West Virginia University women's soccer player, the one who earned team MVP honors for coach
Nikki Izzo-Brown in 2011, but sports lovers in Canada are getting to know Caroline Szwed for her outstanding work on Sportsnet, Canada's No. 1 sports network, which is carried in 8.2 million homes across the country.
In a year's time, Szwed has gone from being an associate producer at CBC Sports writing stories for its social media platforms and websites to becoming one of Canada's more recognizable faces as Sportsnet's host of Plays of the Month, Misplays of the Month and its popular WWE Show, Aftermath.
Someone along the way wisely recognized that it was probably better to have Caroline in front of a camera delivering content instead of her writing content for others.
"As soon as I was hired at Sportsnet they didn't throw me into any of the year-end shows because it didn't make sense," she said earlier this week. "I started the year with a fresh season of shows. In the meantime, I do any original branded content – things that come our way where we do features with athletes that are made into commercials or features that air during scheduled Sportsnet programming."
A lot of Caroline's work is now showing up on the internet,
such as the feature she did earlier this summer with Canada's strongest woman, Allison Lockhart, instructing her how to pull a truck during a strongman contest.
The highly competitive Szwed made just one stipulation before taping the feature – if she couldn't do it nobody was to help her!
"The toughest part was to get it going in the beginning, but Allison Lockhart was there instructing me how to do it," she explained. "Once you get it moving, it's really not that difficult to keep it going."
Sort of like Szwed's television career.
Last summer at the WWE Summerslam weekend in Brooklyn, New York,
Caroline went toe-to-toe with The Miz, giving as much as she took from one of WWE's most recognizable personalities.
Szwed also managed to interview Ronda Rousey, which she admits was one of her career highlights to date.
"I have so much respect for her for what she's done both in UFC and WWE," Szwed noted.
Last fall, Toronto Raptors guard Norman Powell got more than he bargained for during an on-camera interview with Szwed when he casually asked her about the massive scar on her right knee, the product of three surgeries that prematurely ended her Mountaineer career in 2013.
Powell's wonderment that Szwed was a former college athlete required her to prove it by juggling the basketball on her foot right in front of him – in heels! – with the camera still rolling.
Once again, Szwed confidently held her own, earning the respect and admiration of her viewership.
"Norm was comfortable enough to joke around so that gave me the opportunity to juggle the basketball right in front of him," she laughed. "That was a fun moment, and I was surprised that I could still do it."
It was a similar deal in San Jose, California, last weekend when Szwed was covering the NHL All-Star Weekend for Rogers Media, which owns Sportsnet. She walked the red carpet, danced with mascots, hosted a fan experience where she bantered with fans and even took a couple of left-handed slapshots in sneakers.
A trip to Las Vegas to tape another Sportsnet feature is on her horizon.
Those in the industry are beginning to take note of her work. Toronto's most-read commuter magazine,
On the Go, profiled Caroline last September (
Caroline Szwed The Fresh Face of Sportsnet) as her national brand continues to grow.
The always-smiling, always-positive Szwed comes across confident on camera, but she admits that's still very much a work in progress. She said she is someone who continues to live "10 years into the future" instead of focusing on the present.
"Confidence is a big part of it, but it all comes from prep," she explained. "It was that way with soccer and it's the same thing here. If you prep for your shows, write your scripts and memorize them and feel confident about it, then you are going to go into the studio with a good attitude."
Szwed, who earned her master's degree in broadcast journalism from WVU, got some good on-air training analyzing Mountaineer women's soccer matches for the live web streams the University produces on WVUsports.com.
That led to some additional work with ROOT Sports Pittsburgh and then to a content producer job back in her native Toronto.
Each small step she has taken has created a bigger opportunity.
"It's all credit to the people that I work with," she says modestly. "I can't say enough good things about them. I have so many people who every single day help me with things."
That may be the case, but television is a highly competitive and unforgiving business. Each step up the ladder brings even more competition and more pressure. In this field, natural ability will ultimately trump any relationships developed along the way.
"When you are in a studio you have to talk like you are not reading," she explained. "It has to be conversational. To do that you have to watch your tone, your pitch and your energy. And while doing that you have to sound excited and smile and there have been so many people who have helped me ...
"Now I have to be better than I was the last time I was in the studio or the last time I traveled and that's helped me," she continued. "You have pressure to perform so you have to have amazing time-management skills. There will be days when you work all day and all night. It's about pulling through, but at the end of the day it's easy when you love your job."
Szwed says her next mountain to scale is live television.
"I would love to progress to live TV, but right now I've been here for about a year and it's about being comfortable and doing everything in a certain pace," she said. "That's my job, but I'm sure down the road I will be able to do that, too."
In the meantime, it's more Plays and Misplays of the Month, taped every couple of weeks, and Aftermath, which tapes on Tuesdays. There's also the WWE Vintage show that airs before each pay-per-view match, her Toronto Maple Leafs work plus the special features she's periodically assigned to do on location with a production crew.
That's a pretty full plate for her to take on right now.
"Just like in sports, there's always room to grow," Szwed explained. "The industry is always changing and there's always something for me to work on. It constantly pushes me to get better.
"It's a very hard industry to get into and I'm very fortunate. A lot of the credit goes to the people that I work with. The bosses I have are unbelievable. I have not had a bad experience," she concluded.
Indeed, the sun is shining brightly in Caroline Szwed's life right now, even as the snow continues to pile up outside of her window.
