Lisa Byington won a state title in Oratory. Now she is the voice of the Milwaukee Bucks.

On September 15, 2021, the Milwaukee Bucks, then the reigning NBA champions, named a new television play-by-play announcer to succeed a man who had held the job for thirty-five years. They chose Lisa Byington. No woman had ever been the full-time TV play-by-play voice of a major men’s professional team in this country. She has said the size of it did not sink in until Billie Jean King sent congratulations.

It capped a remarkable year. That March she had become the first woman to call play-by-play at the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and that summer she called Olympic soccer for NBC.

She is from Portage, Michigan, and she has told an interviewer where it started. Asked when she knew broadcasting was her calling, she said the move from print journalism was never much of a leap, because she had always gravitated toward public speaking. She “did forensics and debate in high school,” she said, and spoke at her graduation.

What she left out is that she won.

State champion, and everything else

In the spring of 1993, as a Portage Northern junior, Byington won the MIFA state championship in Oratory. An oration is an original persuasive speech, written by the student who delivers it. Events were not yet divided by school size, so the biggest schools in Michigan and the smallest competed in one bracket, and she won it out of twenty-six who made it to State. She qualified for State again as a senior.

She did this while being one of the best high school athletes in the state. She was a finalist for Miss Basketball and left Portage Northern with twenty-eight school records, among them 1,392 points, 384 assists and 379 steals. She was all-state in soccer too. Her father coached her in basketball all four years, and in that time the program went from losing games by forty points to playing in the state semifinals.

Her last high school game is part of the story. A Kalamazoo television station did a feature on it and caught her father hugging her as she came off the court. Watching it, she has said, was the first time she understood that a story on television could move people, and that telling them might be a job.

As a kid she had already been rehearsing. She taped the theme music from the 1987 NCAA championship broadcast off a VHS recording onto a cassette, and played it in the driveway while she shot baskets.

Alpena, Lansing, everywhere

Northwestern recruited her for basketball, and as a junior she walked on to the soccer team as well. She was academic all-Big Ten three times in one sport and twice in the other, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Medill School of Journalism.

Her first job in television was at WBKB in Alpena, one of the smallest markets in America, for $14,000 a year. Then came about a decade at WLNS in Lansing. She joined the Big Ten Network for its first football weekend in 2007. Her first play-by-play assignment came as a surprise, a Michigan State women’s basketball game, and she has been calling games ever since: the Chicago Sky beginning in 2013, the first football game called by a woman on the Big Ten Network in 2017, the Women’s World Cup for FOX in 2019.

The honors have followed. The Big Ten now gives the Lisa Byington Award each year to its top female student broadcaster, with a week at the network’s studios as part of the prize. She won a regional Emmy for her first season with the Bucks. In 2026 Medill named her to its Hall of Achievement.

She has just finished her fifth season in Milwaukee, and this year she added WNBA play-by-play for Prime Video. She still calls Sky games, alongside her wife, the broadcaster Shimmy Miller.

She prepares thirty to forty hours for each broadcast. She describes her approach in the booth the way a point guard would, as setting up her partner before looking for her own shot. And she has said what she is really after is for a woman’s voice on a men’s game to become so ordinary that nobody remarks on it.

Michigan heard that voice first. It belonged to a high school junior with a speech she had written herself, standing in front of a judge, making her case.