Yo! Welcome into the House of L podcast. I'm Lauren Tombs. Thank you so much for hanging out here with me. It has been a minute, honestly since I've actually talked to someone on the podcast.

I get it. I've been doing a lot of talking to myself on the podcast. But I think for good reason. If you haven't checked out the last couple of episodes, it's been me talking about kind of the state of sports media and some of the things that I'm concerned with inside of sports media.

And throughout the football season, I do my football pod and I kind of wanted to take a little bit of a break from just sitting and interviewing people.

And I know that that's partially why House of L exists and how it started. But in the four years that we've been doing it, the podcast is also involved. But I do like talking with people.

So I have a few interviews set up with people inside of the business that I think you will enjoy, including I'm happy that you clicked on this particular episode because I think Courtney Cronin has done a really incredible job of establishing herself locally, which is a big deal.

And now you're seeing her establish herself nationally and I I predict big things for her. Like you can tell when you see her on around the horn and you're starting to see her on sports center like that sort of thing.

I hope that she stays based in Chicago. I mean, I don't.

I hate losing good people even when they go national and you're like, man, those people were here and you look up and you see Nick Friedell or Malika Andrews and you're like, could there be a bureau here?

And I guess the answer to that is yes, because Michelle Steel is here. She's someone I got to get on the podcast too. But Courtney's done a really good job of establishing herself.

And it's not easy, especially on that beat. The Bears beat is the city hall of sports. It is competitive and everyone wants to try to get to that beat because of how many people are paying attention to what's happening on the Bears beat.

But it's not what we really talked about. It's funny because I don't think we actually got to bear stuff like hardcore bear stuff until closer to the end of the interview, which is cool, which is part of the reason I like doing this because I can talk to people about all sorts of stuff.

Including us talking about our our common bond. And that bond is Jeff Dickerson as it is for a lot of people who have covered the bears over the last 20 years.

I consider JD my peer, you know, like at one point he was actually my intern, but he he's he was my peer and Courtney considers JD a mentor and both of us having these like different relationships with JD at different times of his life.

Where we came up in the business together, like the covering of sports that we were doing it together.

And I cherish that like we were travel partners, you know, we we had to room together a couple of times, especially during.

And we we had to room together after Katrina in New Orleans and that was hilarious. It was buddy cop show like we were in Jacksonville, we go to shoneys together in the morning.

I mean, you guys know how I feel about Jeff Dickerson, just a really, really good man and hearing Courtney's point of view on her relationship with JD.

I thought was fascinating and I'm glad that she was open to the idea of talking about it because it's hard when you really love a person the way that Jeff Dickerson was loved.

It's sometimes hard to talk about them when they're not here. So I'm glad that Courtney opened up on that. We talked about a whole bunch of stuff and she's had quite the career.

You know, she's been in some very interesting like her, her career path has been extremely interesting because of the places and experiences that she's had and how it all congeals into the person and reporter that she is right now.

So this is my conversation with ESPN's Courtney Cronin about her whole career and it starts with us talking about how she made it back to Chicago.

Million dollar question, right? Like there's a thousand different places you can start with that, but like here to Chicago came right around a year ago right now after the late great amazing mentor of mine, Jeff Dickerson had, you know, tragically passed away with cancer.

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