Katie Nolan talks sports like a Boston bartender. It’s because she was one

“Robot umpires in baseball are inevitable,” Katie Nolan said in a YouTube video from January. “But I’m telling you right now: you’re going to miss having a human whose face  you can scream into.”

Nolan hosts Casuals, a SiriusXM podcast that takes a wry, comedic look at sports news.

She emerged out of Boston’s sports commentary scene in the mid-2010s as part of a cohort of personalities shaped by blogs and YouTube. Between 2015 and 2021, she was a prominent sports television host and panelist, first at Fox Sports, then at ESPN.

Nolan spoke with WBUR about how her Massachusetts roots have shaped her career.

Highlights from this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.

On your show, you are snarky and sometimes brash. How much of that do you think might come from growing up in Framingham?

“I would say roughly 100%.

“Us gals from the Boston area, from Massachusetts, we're a particular brand of sass, which isn't for everybody.”

Your mom was a bartender at Owen O’Leary’s in Southborough, and then you worked there as well. How has all that shaped your worldview?

“That's so funny. This is probably the first time I've done an interview where anybody knows what Owen O'Leary's in Southborough is. This is so close to home.

“Yeah, my mom is a very sociable person, and she’s a fantastic bartender. My whole life, she was working as a bartender at Owen O'Leary's, and I think that's partially how I got introduced to sports radio because my mom would listen to WEEI so that she would have stuff to talk to her patrons about at the bar at night. I mean, in Massachusetts, if you're born here, you have to kind of know what you're talking about when it comes to sports, just in general.

“Growing up in a bar, you can't really ever do ‘Bring Your Daughter To Work Day’ because your mom's shift ends at 2 a.m. and you have to go to school the next day.

“But then eventually I started working there and I called her Cammie. I called her by her first name while we worked together so that she wouldn't have a waitress at the end at the service bar yelling, ‘Mom, I need a martini.’ So we pretended like we were just very close work friends.”

And then you moved on from Southborough. You kind of got your career rolling when you were bartending in Allston and you started a blog. It occurs to me that for a lot of people, those circumstances would be just sort of like a rite of passage or a lark. But for you, it really took off. How much did you plan your trajectory?

“I mean, I had no idea. I started a blog because I saw other people doing it and it seemed like something I could do. And this was, you know, 2011 or 2012, and it felt like, ‘just go make one and then maybe if you post on it enough, people will take it seriously and think you're an actual blog.’

“That kind of did happen, and I had a job reach out and say, ‘we want you to do video for us.’ So then I was producing my own daily YouTube videos for like a year and a half, while I was bartending at night in Allston at the White Horse Tavern, which I've heard is no longer with us. RIP. It’s a shame.

“Then things just sort of happened. It was a lot of luck. A lot of hard work, but a lot of luck and timing. It ended up that a sports network was launching and they needed talent; they saw that I had hours and hours of me on video, filmed in my own home.

“They took a chance on me and since then I've just been sort of trying to not get kicked out of this wonderful home I've been invited into of sports media.”