From Knutson Hall to the Network Control Room: How Sarita Meinking (’04) turned a Midwestern work ethic, an air mattress, and a knack for networking into a vice presidency at Fox Sports 

By Kim Westerman | October 2026

Sarita Meinking arrived at UWSP in the fall of 2002 with a scholarship in hand and a roommate already lined up through a friend. She was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from home in Lake Holcombe, ready to play sports and take on the world. What she discovered instead was intramurals, general education courses, and the undeniable appeal of campus social life that set her on a winding road that would eventually lead to the vice presidency of field operations at Fox Sports. 

Today, Meinking oversees remote operations for some of the biggest events in American sports: college football bowl games, college basketball, the Belmont Stakes, and more. She has been in the Fox family, counting her time at the Big Ten Network, since 2010. Getting there, she’ll tell you, was not exactly a straight line, but a curvy one with several detours. 

A Point of Departure 

Meinking spent two years at UW-Stevens Point, living in Knutson Hall and participating in intramurals — even reffing basketball games. She arrived expecting athletics to remain the center of her college experience but found herself exploring new possibilities instead. Like many students, she was trying to figure out what would come next. 

She thought she was on a path toward teaching, or maybe marketing, the way many students have a skeletal plan before they figure out what they actually want to do. “You just don’t know,” she says. “I think I was going to go into teaching. Maybe marketing. You don’t really know what you’re doing yet.” 

Looking back, she sees those years as an important period of exploration. The willingness to get involved, meet people, and try new things would later become one of her greatest professional strengths. When a pair of friends decided to transfer to another institution, she went with them and shifted her focus to TV and on-air programming because, as she puts it, “You don’t know any other positions besides the person who’s on air.” As she learned other roles, she discovered a whole world behind the camera she had never considered.  

The shift that changed everything came in the spring of 2007. Meinking was able to secure a role as a student production assistant for NFL Films — the legendary production arm of the league, which produces HBO’s Hard Knocks. The Kansas City Chiefs were holding training camp in her area and Meinking, about to graduate and still bartending, signed on for three weeks: seven days a week, $200 a day, no matter how many hours.  

An Air Mattress and a Leap of Faith 

After that summer, Meinking did something that has defined her career philosophy ever since: She reached out to the network she had been unknowingly creating. She called the camera operators and producers she’d met on the Hard Knocks shoot and asked if she could visit the NFL Films office in South Jersey, just to keep the relationship going. They said yes. Someone mentioned an internship. It was unpaid. She applied anyway. 

She got the internship, packed her Pontiac Bonneville with clothes, shoes, and an air mattress, and headed east. Her father drove out with her and then flew home. Meinking stayed in a hotel on her credit card for two weeks while hunting for housing and picked up weekend production assistant work on Philadelphia-area film shoots — Huggies commercials, the Transformers franchise, whatever was filming — to pay her rent. She eventually rented a room from a producer at NFL Films. 

The Midwestern work ethic she brought from Wisconsin, and the relationship-building instincts she had honed since her days at Stevens Point, helped her find her footing in a completely unfamiliar environment. “I was just this nice Midwestern kid,” she says with a laugh. 

After three months, NFL Films offered her a seasonal staff position. At nearly the same moment, a contact she had stayed in touch with, Susan Stone, who had just left NFL Films to help launch MLB Network in Secaucus, New Jersey, called her with a staff coordinator job. The pay was $37,500. It was less than Meinking had hoped for, but she took it anyway. “I had to make forty thousand a year to survive,” she remembers. “I was living in Cherry Hill, one of the most elite neighborhoods in South Jersey, sleeping on an air mattress. But I figured I just needed internet and rent, and that was it.” 

Moving Up the Dial 

At MLB Network, Meinking thrived. She moved from coordinator to manager to senior manager, handling the logistics of remote operations for marquee events like the World Series and the All-Star Game — credentials, parking, travel, on-site production, and a growing list of other responsibilities. The job took her everywhere. 

In 2010, she was at the World Series when she got a call about a remote operations manager position at Big Ten Network in Chicago. She almost didn’t go to the interview because, well, she was at the World Series. But she knew she had to, and she did. They offered her $87,000. She told them she wouldn’t leave MLB Network for less than $100,000. They agreed, a deal was struck, and Meinking realized she’d learned to trust her professional worth. 

The Big Ten years were, by her own account, the most difficult of her career, a lesson in corporate culture and in what kind of leader she did not want to become. But she stayed five years. “You learn a lot when you figure out what you don’t want to be like,” she says. 

Going Freelance, Landing at Fox 

When a former colleague called to tell her that Fox was launching a golf channel and needed freelance field operations help, Meinking was ready to go. She left her staff job, went freelance, and traveled constantly. She knew nothing about golf when she started, but she learned fast. “At my first tournament, someone asked me where the bathrooms were near the course,” she says. “I realized: Oh, we need to put bathrooms out there.” 

She was eventually hired on staff and worked her way up. Last year, she was promoted to vice president, overseeing field operations for the full slate of college sports on Fox, including football, basketball, and events like an upcoming Villanova-Notre Dame game being played at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome, Italy, the first game of the season for both programs. 

The Advice She Keeps Giving 

Meinking is a frequent featured speaker at college sports broadcast summits. The advice she gives is consistent: Networking is not optional, and neither is basic human presence. 

“Apply through the company’s own website, not just LinkedIn or Indeed,” she says. “And then follow up. Don’t just send it and go back to TikTok.” She pauses. “Make eye contact. Be able to hold a conversation. You’d be surprised how many people can’t look up from the table.” 

She thinks about her own start often: the $200-a-day Hard Knocks gig, the air mattress, the unpaid internship that led, in circuitous but inevitable ways, to where she is now. 

She also thinks about the student who arrived at UWSP without a clear career plan, just following her nose and honing her instincts. At the time, a vice presidency at a national sports network wasn’t even on the horizon. “You have to be willing to show up even when you don’t know anyone,” she says. “You have to walk the path that’s laid out before you.” 

It’s a lesson that began at UWSP and eventually carried her all the way to executive management at a major television network. And she remains a nice Midwestern kid at heart.