LAS VEGAS – After Super Bowl 58, the Harlan family will stop making broadcast history.
Veteran play-by-play voice Kevin Harlan will be on the national radio call when the Kansas City Chiefs face the San Francisco 49ers. His daughter, Olivia Harlan Dekker, will serve as the sideline reporter for Sky Sports, which televises the NFL in the United Kingdom.
Together, they will be the first father-daughter combo to call and cover, respectively, a Super Bowl – repeating the history they made as the first dad-daughter in both the regular season and playoffs.
“I started getting coached really early … I did dream of being here,” Harlan Dekker, working her first Super Bowl, told USA TODAY Sports.
Working in conjunction with his daughter, Harlan – calling his 15th Super Bowl (14th consecutive) for Westwood One – is reminded of when he would tag along with his father, Green Bay Packers executive Bob Harlan, to stadiums and press boxes.
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“A lot of it rubbed off on me,” Harlan told USA TODAY Sports, “and I assume she would say a lot of what I have done has rubbed off on her.”
‘Roundabout’ way to call first Super Bowl
Harlan Dekker, who married former NBA player Sam Dekker in 2018, wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps from the time she was 15. She created a vision board with sideline reporters such as Lisa Salters and Tracy Wolfson plastered on it. But Harlan knew that the sports broadcasting business is a subjective one and that his daughter had seen him experience the best part of it: the stable work as a network announcer.
“I tried to talk her out of it, quite frankly,” Harlan, 63, said.
That didn’t stop Harlan from encouraging his daughter and telling her to look up sports broadcasting icons such as Lesley Visser.
“My dad was the type of parent who completely, not only convinced you of ‘Yes, you can do anything you want,’ but encouraged you to keep pushing – keep doing more,” Harlan Dekker, 30, said.
Attending the University of Georgia, Harlan Dekker dove into the school’s journalism program. How seriously she took the work in college told Harlan and his wife, Ann, all they needed to know about their daughter’s professional aspirations.
“She went in headfirst and she’s been one of the lucky ones,” Harlan said. “She’s had a wonderful and remarkable career for someone so young.”
Of course, having Harlan as a father in the sports journalism industry has some benefits. While at Georgia, Harlan connected Harlan Dekker with Wolfson, his CBS colleague who was then calling the top Southeastern Conference game each Saturday during the fall. Harlan Dekker said she shadowed Wolfson for hours and began learning the craft of sideline reporting.
“She stood apart from her dad,” Wolfson, who will also be roaming the sidelines Sunday as the No. 1 NFL sideline reporter for CBS now, told USA TODAY Sports. “She was so spunky and smart and had such great presence about her and (was) so interested in the job, wanting to learn. And that’s what I loved. She was just taking it all in up and down those sidelines.”
Professional success came quickly for Harlan Dekker. She worked Atlanta Hawks games for FOX Sports South and joined ESPN as a college football reporter in 2015.
Life is not linear, she learned. Dekker’s basketball career took him overseas, and the couple bounced around from Russia to Turkey to London. Harlan Dekker would fly back to the U.S. and work college football games for the Big Ten Network in 2020 and 2021.
“At some point, we realized this isn’t working,” Harlan Dekker said. “We had to really buy into being overseas.”
She gave birth to the couple’s first child, son Harlan Wolf Dekker, in May 2022, and Dekker signed an extension to remain with the London Lions. Harlan Dekker thought her retirement might come before she reached 30, or that she would have to put career on pause at the bare minimum. Neither option appealed to her.
Feeling discouraged, Harlan Dekker caught a break when the NFL UK office reached out and connected her to SkySports. Few people in London had Harlan Dekker’s resume of reporting on American football, and the outlet wanted an American voice to be part of the broadcasts.
“The timing was there,” Harlan said. “A lot of this profession is timing.”
Her first assignment was the Baltimore Ravens playing the Tennessee Titans in London in October. She then worked both NFL games in Frankfurt, Germany, and SkySports brought her into the studio for games the network aired with remote broadcasts.
“I was like, ‘Man, they’re really using me, this is amazing,’ I thought I was kind of dropping in,” Harlan Dekker said.
It culminated with Harlan Dekker receiving a phone call that left her on the verge of tears: she would be covering the Super Bowl.
“I just feel incredibly grateful for how it’s happened – the roundabout way it’s happened,” Harlan Dekker said.
On Saturday night in Las Vegas, the Harlan family will go out to dinner and, while they may leave their notes back at the hotel, the topic of discussion will be their respective preparations for the following day’s assignment.
For Harlan, every moment will be cherished.
“I mean, listen,” he said, “what parent wouldn’t want to be working with their child?”