Treavor Scales is leaving home and coming home again all at the same.
Scales is exiting his hometown of Atlanta and returning to ESPN in Connecticut as a SportsCenter anchor after four years away from the network, ESPN confirmed exclusively to Front Office Sports.
“It was the perfect opportunity at the perfect time—the dream job that I never would have thought to ask for,” Scales told FOS.
This summer, Scales will guest-host the various editions of SportsCenter. Mike Foss, ESPN’s SVP of sports studio and entertainment, said that the “intention” is for Scales to be in a recurring daily anchor spot—like Randy Scott and Gary Striewski have 7 a.m. ET, Elle Duncan and Kevin Negandhi have 6 p.m. ET, etc.—by this fall.
Foss said Scales is “ego-less in all the best ways.” As anyone who has worked around the TV business will attest, this is not a description regularly applied to on-air talent.
Scales, who played running back at Harvard, started his career as a crew coordinator in remote operations at ESPN in 2013. He ultimately earned a fellowship opportunity to get on-air at ESPN. He did work on the international feed, then caught on at SportsCenter on Snapchat for several years before leaving in 2021.
“It was something that I valued, the involvement of the on-air folks in the production element of it. It was structured where we were all sitting in a big meeting room at 7:30 p.m. with big TVs, all watching the marquee events of the evening,” Scales said of his experience on the Snapchat news and highlights program. “I’d play musical chairs and sit next to each segment producer, writing out the script with them as the games unfolded, and come up with skits and sketches.”
Scales cited Duncan, Striewski, and Christine Williamson as “road dogs,” from his initial time at ESPN with whom he’s remained close friends.
In his time away from ESPN, Scales hosted Braves and Hawks coverage on the Bally/FanDuel RSN, and he was a sideline reporter for the ACC on The CW. It was eye-opening for him to go from a national generalist to being hyper-focused on two local teams.
“The beauty of the regional network was the family atmosphere that we wound up developing,” Scales said. “We were all covering the exact same team. We all had the same frustrations when they had losing slumps and rode the highs on winning streaks. It was different in the sense of how intimate that wound up being, with 150 to 160 games that you’re doing with the Braves and close to 82 with the Hawks.”
