Meet NABI’s all-Native broadcast team working the tournament's semifinal and championship games

Lynette Lewis, the Native American Basketball Invitational’s director of basketball operations, is wearing multiple hats during tournament week.

On top of her duties as tournament director, Lewis will be the color analyst for the girls’ division semifinal games on Friday, broadcasting with commentator Chance Rush. Lewis said this will be her first time broadcasting on a major platform, but she has experience on the NABI YouTube roundtable and interview series.

“I mean, I'm definitely excited,” Lewis said. “Like, this is huge, especially now that we're going to be an all-Native broadcast team. A little nervous, yeah, I'm sure the day of I'll be a lot more nervous.”

NABI President and CEO GinaMarie Scarpa said Lewis will be perfect in a color analyst role, and Lewis will bring the storytelling as she’s known the players and teams in the tournament for years.

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NABI games will be on a major platform for the first time in tournament history this week. ESPN+, a subscription service, will stream the semifinal and championship games on July 22 and 23.

ESPN+ costs $6.99 a month for subscribers, but Scarpa said that the games will also be streamed for free on NABI Network to be as accessible as possible.

For Lewis, having a major platform like ESPN+ will give NABI players somewhere to show off their talents.

“The thing for me is the recognition that our indigenous communities are going to get knowing that, you know, we're still here, we exist, we’re thriving,” Lewis said. “We heard that ESPN+ has over 22 million subscribers, so just knowing that anyone out there is going to see this and realize, ‘Wow, these kids are talented.’”

The 2022 tournament will be the first all-Native American sporting event on a major network, so Scarpa wanted to make sure she could find the best Native American talent to broadcast.

"That's why it was important for us to make sure that our talent was Native American,” Scarpa said. “...Some days I think it's hit me, but I don't think it will hit me to the full extent until we're actually living in it. And then we're able to go, ‘We just did that.’ That was the next level, and that's what NABI is known for, just constantly taking it up to the next level.”

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Play-by-play broadcaster and color analyst Tyler Jones and NABI alumni Maisey Gillies will be on the boys' division semifinal games, as well as both championship games at the Footprint Center.

Jones got his start in broadcasting at Broken Arrow High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, commentating on high school games.  After attending Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, he worked in the Lawrence area and Omaha before moving down to Dallas, Texas, where he is now an NFL host and analyst.

Jones, who is part of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, grew up in a suburban area of Tulsa and said he didn’t have a lot of connection to his Native American culture until he went to university.

“It was very eye-opening being around kids that, it was their first time off the reservation, and just seeing what they had gone through and some of their life experiences,” Jones said. "I couldn't relate to a lot of it at first and so I learned about their upbringing and their struggles they went through and took it on my own at that point to where, through sports, I could share their stories.”

While Jones was at Haskell Indian Nations University, he interned and worked for Brent Cahwee, who runs ndnsports.com, a website dedicated to Native American sports news. Jones also met Robert Judkins, the executive producer of the NABI broadcasts, through an event with the Native American Journalists Association.

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Through Cahwee and Judkins, Jones said he got his first opportunity to commentate NABI games in 2021, when the tournament started broadcasting. Jones provided commentary in the semifinal and championship games with Cahwee on NABI’s self-produced broadcast.

Now, Jones will be making his ESPN debut with NABI this week.

“When it comes to broadcast, ESPN is the goal," Jones said. "Not only am I finally making it, getting up there of what I've always wanted to do, do work for ESPN, but also getting to make history while doing it, too, is pretty humbling.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: NABI's final games will feature an all-Native American broadcast team