By Tiffany Williams –
Long before Asia Horton was preparing professional basketball players for reporters, coordinating press conferences or working behind the scenes of a WNBA game, she was a little girl in northern Louisiana who had been taught something simple by the people around her: almost anything was possible.
Horton was born and raised in Shreveport, far from the version of Louisiana most outsiders picture first. Her childhood was filled with family, faith and a mother and grandfather who made sure she never felt as though her dreams were too big.
“I was blessed with a lot of family and a lot of support, especially from my mom and my papa,” Horton said. “I always say that I was raised in a family where literally anything was possible.”
She watched that philosophy become real. When her aunt decided she wanted a store, Horton said her aunt and grandfather opened their own dollar store. As a child, Horton got to work the register, stock merchandise and help around the business.
Her mother, Anita, provided another constant. Horton is an only child, and whatever direction her imagination took her, her mother was prepared to go along for the ride.
There were quite a few directions.
In middle school, Horton wanted to work in forensics. She was so interested that a forensics club was started. Then reality set in: this was not “Law & Order” or “Criminal Minds.”
By high school, she had moved on to medicine. Her mother was a phlebotomist and later became a social worker, and Horton secured an internship at the VA in Shreveport. She decided she wanted to become an OB-GYN.
She arrived at Grambling State University as a biology major on the pre-med track.
Then came anatomy and physiology.
“And I did not know what the femur was,” Horton recalled. “And that’s when I was like, you know, I can’t be anyone’s doctor.”
It was a funny realization, but also a consequential one.
Horton had spent years running from something she had been naturally drawn to since childhood: writing.
As a middle school student, she and her friends passed around a book filled with stories they created together. One friend would write one week, another would take over the next. Sometimes they created their own stories. Sometimes they continued someone else’s.
Even disagreements among the friends found their way onto the pages through fictional characters.
“And I just love putting words together,” Horton said. “Like, I don’t know, I was always good at writing.”
Her faith gave her another place to develop that voice.
Horton grew up deeply involved in church. Her grandfather was a pastor, her mother was an usher, her aunt played piano, and Horton served as a youth president and participated in praise dance, Easter programs, Christmas plays and choir.
“Nothing that I have accomplished could have been done without my faith and without trusting in God,” Horton said. “That was my foundation for a lot of things.”
Eventually, the young woman who had tried to escape writing changed her major to English.
That decision led her somewhere she had never expected.
Grambling athletics.
Horton had grown up around sports. Her grandfather took her to Dallas Cowboys games, although she jokes that she was essentially forced into those outings and never became a Cowboys fan. Her younger cousins played sports.
But Horton did not initially know there could be a career for someone like her behind the scenes.
“I did not know what a sports information director was until I started interning in the athletics department,” she said. “And that, for me, really was the reason why I was like, okay, I want to get into sports.”
Her first team was Grambling women’s basketball.
At first, she concentrated on social media rather than writing. In the post-COVID environment, social media had become increasingly important for college athletic departments, particularly at HBCUs.
Horton began attending practices and watching how much it meant to players simply to have someone there documenting them — taking photographs, capturing their personalities and showing the work they were doing away from game day.
“I was like, OK, I like this feeling of serving a team,” Horton said.
That feeling changed her direction.
She wanted to learn more. She wanted to improve her photography. She wanted to learn video.
Eventually, she returned to writing.
Her English professors were helping build that part of her, too, although sometimes the lessons were uncomfortable.
Horton remembers turning in a paper and having a professor challenge her belief that she was a good writer. Instead of destroying her confidence, the experience ultimately pushed her.
Then another professor read a research paper Horton had written about “Hamlet” and wanted to submit it for a Shakespeare convention.
“I was confused. I was very, very confused,” Horton said. “I was like, you want me to present this research? And I think that moment for me was like, OK, I know what I’m doing.”
There were people all around Grambling who helped Horton get there.
She credits Dr. McKenzie and Dr. Gould in the English department, Ms. Livingston in career services, Taylor Jean Lewis, whom Horton describes as her first true mentor, and Kiana White, who helped her through a particularly difficult senior year.
Some encouraged her. Some challenged her. Some told her what she needed to hear rather than what she wanted to hear.
Horton also learned by doing.
At softball games, when she did not know how to stat, she arrived early and wrote down the codes her boss entered into the computer. She watched what happened when a play was missed and how it was corrected.
She tried broadcasting a basketball game. She tried calling a softball game. She moved throughout the athletic department asking where she could help and what she could learn.
“I don’t know how a person could work in sports and not get hands-on experience,” Horton said.
That experience eventually carried her beyond Grambling.
At the University of Florida, Horton became the primary communications contact for men’s tennis and worked with women’s basketball. Suddenly, she was not merely helping someone else make decisions.
She owned them.
“I wasn’t used to calling shots,” Horton said. “I was more used to assisting with the shots and not really calling them.”
Another opportunity took her to NBA All-Star Weekend, working in creative services.
That experience changed her perspective again.
“Honestly, I think working NBA All-Star Weekend made me realize that I wanted that life,” Horton said. “When I got a piece of that, I was like, I want this again. I don’t want it to just be a week. I want this to be my life.”
It was also there that she met WNBA players and experienced another lesson about the importance of relationships in sports.
Her career began moving quickly.
Horton graduated from Grambling in December 2023. By January 2024, she was at Florida. She later moved to Marquette and then, in April, joined the Connecticut Sun.
There are still moments when Horton has to remind herself that this is actually her life.
And there are moments when she has to remind herself that she belongs in it.
“Every day I do feel like I’m trying to prove to myself that I belong here,” Horton said.
For Horton, being a woman in sports also means recognizing the progress that has been made while refusing to pretend the work is finished.
She sees more young women entering college already knowing they want careers in sports. Some know they want social media. Others want public relations or sports information.
Horton did not know those possibilities existed when she began college.
She believes the women already working in the industry have helped younger women see what is possible. But she also believes sports remains male-dominated and that inclusion and respect still require work.
At the Connecticut Sun, Horton has found herself surrounded by women she can learn from.
She talked about being able to walk into the president’s office and have a conversation, play Uno with a general manager, or explore New London with a colleague.
For Horton, those seemingly ordinary moments have shown her something extraordinary: what leadership can look like when people do not make their titles barriers.
“I’m able to see the type of leader that I want to be,” Horton said. “There are certain things about each of those people that I want to take with me and I want to practice in my daily life and practice in my career.”
Mentorship has been especially important because visibility matters to Horton.
She remembers seeing women who looked like her and, in some cases, came from backgrounds like hers succeed.
“Once I see that, there’s no reason for me to ever feel like I can’t do it,” Horton said. “So they were really true definitions or examples of if you can see it, you can be it and that’s how I got here.”
Now she occupies one of those visible positions herself.
But much of Horton’s work is intentionally invisible.
A Connecticut Sun game day begins for her before game day.
The day before, she writes the game preview and studies statistics for Connecticut and its opponent. She prepares coaches for questions they could face and makes sure players know what is happening around the league and what subjects the organization may not be addressing.
On game day, she checks pronunciations with the public-address announcer. She sets up press conferences. She makes sure media requests are organized. She checks that the correct opponent appears where it is supposed to.
Then something changes.
A player gets sick. A media request comes in. Someone needs to be somewhere else.
And the plan changes with it.
“I think people think that we aren’t proactive, but they don’t understand how proactive we actually are,” Horton said.
There is another side of sports public relations Horton wishes more journalists understood.
Horton said PR professionals can sometimes be perceived as standing between journalists and athletes. From her perspective, however, there is a responsibility that comes before accommodating every request.
Trust.
“I cannot just give you one of my players for you to ask them anything because they trust me,” Horton said. “We have to build the trust of the player first before we can build the trust of media.”
Horton understands reporters have stories to tell.
But she also knows who she answers to first.
“Yes, you have a job to do and you have a story to get out, but my first priority is protecting my player,” she said.
That philosophy says something about the kind of career Horton hopes to build.
She admires journalist Taylor Rooks, whom she had an opportunity to meet while working NBA All-Star Weekend. Horton said Rooks had even appeared on her vision board.
What Horton admires most is not simply Rooks’ success.
It is how she tells stories.
“The athletes as people first and not just the stats or their awards or their titles,” Horton said. “And that’s something that I really, really look up to.”
That same philosophy is becoming central to Horton’s own work.
She wants people to learn things about their favorite players that they did not already know. She wants athletes to be seen as human beings. She wants them protected without sacrificing good storytelling.
And she wants people to remember that she cared.
Horton has also found community beyond individual teams through the National Association of Black Journalists.
Her interest in NABJ began while she was at Grambling. The university had previously had a chapter, but Horton said its membership was no longer valid and efforts to revive it would have taken longer than the time she had remaining as a student.
So she joined NABJ herself.
Since then, the organization has remained a constant even as her career has moved her from state to state.
“NABJ is always just a way to have community, even if they don’t know you,” Horton said. “Like I have been welcomed by so many members of NABJ that just knew that I was new to the city and needed just like a sense of belonging in a sense.”
She hopes to eventually help revive the Grambling chapter now that she has transitioned from student to professional membership.
For young Black journalists and communications professionals, Horton believes organizations such as NABJ can provide something particularly important: people who understand the journey and want to see them succeed.
“I’ve never felt judged in any space that I have been a part of when it comes to the NABJ,” Horton said. “And it didn’t matter where I started from or what school I went to, they genuinely want to see you win.”
That idea of seeing someone else win runs throughout Horton’s story.
She has been the young woman looking for mentors.
Now she is becoming the woman someone else might look toward.
Ask Horton what she would tell a 17- or 18-year-old version of herself, and the answer has little to do with basketball, public relations or finding the perfect career.
“I wish someone had told me that it’s okay to not have it all figured out,” she said.
And for young women who love sports but know they will never be the athlete running onto the court, Horton wants them to understand just how much exists beyond the lines of play.
There are jobs in public relations, communications, merchandise, entertainment and game presentation. There are ushers and mascots. There are countless people doing jobs fans may never notice.
“You can literally major in anything,” Horton said. “You can be interested in anything and find a spot in sports doing that exact thing.”
Perhaps that message resonates with Horton because she once needed to hear it herself.
She was the biology student who did not know the femur.
The English major who feared people would assume she wanted to become a teacher.
The student who once had no idea what a sports information director was.
Now she is 25 and working in professional women’s basketball.
And when Horton thinks about the women who will arrive after her, she does not want them to spend years waiting for someone to decide they have accumulated enough experience to deserve their first opportunity.
She wants her generation to open the door.
“I wouldn’t be sitting in this spot if it wasn’t for Caroline or Alex or like the women that came before me,” Horton said.
She understands the contradiction young people encounter when employers demand experience but hesitate to give young applicants the opportunity to acquire it.
“What experience are they supposed to have at 21?” Horton asked. “Like, that’s the whole point.”
That may ultimately be the most important part of Asia Horton’s story.
Her career is still young. She readily acknowledges that she is still learning. She still experiences moments of imposter syndrome. She is still figuring out what kind of professional — and even what version of Asia — she will ultimately become.
But she already knows what she wants to leave behind.
“I hope the women that come behind me know that you are very important,” Horton said. “I hope that they know that these organizations, these teams could not run without you. You cannot have any of these teams without your PR, without your comms.”
For a woman whose career began when she discovered there were people working behind the scenes in sports, perhaps there is something fitting about that.
Asia Horton found the door she did not know existed.
Now she wants to hold it open.