Carla Mackenzie Wants Women’s Sport Covered All Year, Not Just on Match Day
For Carla Mackenzie, the microphone has never been only about the result on the day. As the only woman hosting the RSG Sport show, she has built a career on carrying women’s sport into the heart of mainstream conversation, and in a media landscape that still too often treats women athletes as an afterthought, that work matters.
Mackenzie anchors RSG Sport on Saturdays and serves as executive producer on the weekday drive-time show Spitstyd, a vantage point that lets her shape coverage from both the production desk and the presenter’s chair. It is a position she uses deliberately, working to ensure that women’s sport is treated as mainstream news rather than a specialist add-on.
By discussing it alongside the major national stories of the day, and by keeping consistent coverage going on match days, such as reports on a Proteas Women’s Test running right through a drive-time afternoon, she helps make women’s sport part of the everyday sporting landscape.
Her move to SuperSport for rugby and SuperSport Schools for athletics, along with her work on MultiChoice and Canal+ school facility handovers, has placed her closer than ever to the emerging-talent pipeline she is determined to nurture. It is a long way from where she started, at Stellenbosch University’s campus station MFM 92.6, and she remains a firm believer in grassroots and community media as the foundation on which the next generation of women broadcasters is built.
At that level, she argues, young broadcasters gain real experience with equipment, editing and writing, and just as importantly, the room to discover what they are good at.
Her central argument about coverage is a simple one, and she makes it plainly. The problem, as she sees it, is that much of the coverage is event-driven rather than focussing on teams or individual athletes year-round. Providing more insight into the lives of women sports stars outside their primary competition cycles, she believes, could significantly increase engagement and visibility for the sport.
Closely tied to that is her view of how sportswomen are framed when they do get airtime. Too often, she argues, the lens settles on adversity rather than achievement.
“There’s often too much focus on the challenges elite South African sportswomen have faced and not enough on their sporting excellence.”
Sports Broadcasting All-Rounder, Carla Mackenzie
Being Afrikaans is, for Mackenzie, not a niche but an asset. “Being an Afrikaans woman in broadcasting allows me to perfectly combine my passion for sport with my love for the Afrikaans language,” she says, describing the authentic connection it allows her to build with listeners drawn from every walk of life. RSG is national, she points out, and its signal reaches Afrikaans-speaking sports fans in every region, from the cities to the rugby-mad club culture of the Swartland.
With June marking Youth Month and the legacy of 16 June 1976, that sense of connection turns personal. Mackenzie speaks of an inquisitive mind shaped by sport, and of arriving in Johannesburg wanting to understand the day properly. She wanted, she says, to have tea with Antoinette Sithole, the sister of Hector Pieterson, to understand what truly happened that particular day and why the country marks Youth Day.
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That same instinct now finds expression in the school facility handovers she is part of, in places like Schweizer-Reneke and Bloemfontein, “where otherwise people would not have had any fields to play on.” To be used in that way, she says, is truly special.
Working closer to the school and emerging-talent pipeline has also changed how she tells stories. With established stars, she notes, a broadcaster arrives armed with statistics; with young athletes, the journey is only beginning, and there is something special in starting it alongside them. She draws a parallel with the music interviews she also does, where there is a particular joy in meeting an artist early. One day, she reflects, she will be able to say she has followed a young athlete’s career for thirty years.
She points to the Western Cape’s Swartland, the Afrikaans rugby heartland around Malmesbury, as proof of what a small region can produce. It is the area that gave the game Byrhandré Dolf, one of the youngest players in the Springbok Women’s squad, and Mackenzie hopes the club rugby culture along the Weskus and Saldanha Bay will keep inspiring young women to take up the sport.
If radio remains the most accessible free service for reaching young South Africans, Mackenzie sees streaming as the multiplier. Platforms like SuperSport Schools, she points out, do more than serve fans; they turn parents into them. A business parent who cannot make it to a game can now stream their own child’s match, share the link, and draw in the wider family. “There’s a whole ecosystem of fans that is just in your family,” she says, and for her that shift is moving South Africa in the right direction.
Asked for her boldest hope for women’s sports broadcasting over the next few years, Mackenzie returns to people rather than platforms.
“My dream for the next couple of years for women in broadcasting and women in this media space is for them to put up their hand, but for them also to be found.”
The wonderful broadcasters, she adds, are often the ones too busy doing the job to draw attention to themselves, and finding them is the work she believes will deliver many powerful years ahead.
It is a mission she traces, in part, to gsport. Mackenzie credits the platform as a leading contributor to the shifting narrative around women’s sport in South Africa, and Kass Naidoo with paving the way for many women in sports broadcasting. She followed that journey, she has said, because she felt represented. Her fondest gsport memory remains attending the awards in 2024, the year Tatjana Smith was named Athlete of the Year.
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That recognition at the South African Radio Awards, she has said, was more than a personal milestone. As the only woman hosting the RSG Sport show, she reads it as proof to young and aspiring women broadcasters that their work, and the stories they tell, matter in the broader sporting landscape.
She is quick to point to those who lit the way for her, among them her friend Elma Smit, a constant presence she has looked up to since their varsity days, and to the athletes whose tenacity stays with her, such as the para-swimmer Franciske Venter, whose return to competition she counts among the most impactful stories she has shared on air.
From campus radio to a premier weekend anchor seat and recognition at the South African Radio Awards, Mackenzie’s own path mirrors the pipeline she now champions. A junior South African hockey player for several years in the 2000s, she still rides her mountain bike alone to think through the ideas she wants to chase next.
The love of sport, she says, is elevated by having played it as much as having talked about it, and on the evidence of this conversation, the women coming up behind her have a determined advocate at the microphone.
Main Photo Caption: Carla Mackenzie, the only woman hosting the RSG Sport show, has built a career across radio, television and streaming on a simple conviction, that women’s sport belongs in the heart of mainstream news, and she is using every platform she works on to carry the stories of South Africa’s sportswomen and the young athletes coming up behind them. All Photos: Supplied
Photo 2 Caption: From the production desk to the presenter’s chair, Mackenzie shapes how women’s sport reaches listeners on RSG Sport and beyond.
Photo 3 Caption: Away from the studio, Mackenzie rides her mountain bike alone for headspace, turning the quiet kilometres into time to think through new ideas.
Photo 4 Caption: Among Mackenzie’s fondest memories is the 2024 gsport Awards, an evening that affirmed the value of telling women’s sport stories.
Crédito: Link de origem