Niagara Falls native Amy Audibert hits big time in NBA

Amy Audibert played basketball while growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Her choice of where to play in college came down to Niagara University or the University of Miami. Niagara was across the river. Miami was across the continent.

“I could be a big fish in a small pond,” she says, “or a small fish in a big pond.”

Audibert chose Miami. And now, at 37, she’s a big fish in a big pond as a first-year analyst on radio and television for the Miami Heat. How she got her shot at the NBA, after years of calling games for the University at Buffalo, is a tale of talent, persistence, and a lucky pull at the slots. Make that a tall tale – she’s 6 foot 3.

Tonight, she will call Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals. The 8-seed Heat lead the best-of-seven series against the Boston Celtics, three games to none. Only one 8 has ever made the NBA Finals: 1999’s New York Knicks, who lost to the San Antonio Spurs. The 1995 Houston Rockets, at 6, are the lowest seed to win an NBA title.

The Heat, then, are on an unlikely path – though perhaps not as unlikely as the one taken by their analyst.

“I do understand the grind,” she says of the team’s underdog players. “The believing in yourself that it takes.”

As recently as 2019, she was waiting tables at the Fallsview Casino Resort, in Niagara Falls, while also an assistant coach for the women’s team at Brock University, in St. Catharines, and the men’s team at Niagara College, in Welland.

“That was three commitments all at once,” she says. “Kind of crazy, right?”

Audibert got into the biz of basketball analysis at women’s and men’s games at Canisius College a decade or so ago. Then she did women’s and men’s games for several years at UB, often on ESPN3. The money wasn’t much, but the experience was gold.

“If you look at my career, and put a microscope on it, it was Western New York and Canisius and UB where I got my start,” she says. “I was just learning how to be a professional, sitting beside Sal Capaccio and Howard (Simon) and Paul (Peck). And having Matt Gould directing and producing in my ear. These were all professional, industry-standard people. I picked up a lot of good advice. But also, when you are around professionals like that, you kind of have to figure out how to raise your level. I’m so grateful for my time there. It really allowed me to develop.”

She hoped all the while that someday she could move up to pro basketball. To that end, she visited Las Vegas every summer to network with broadcast types during the NBA’s summer-league games.

“I was self-funded,” she says. “And Las Vegas is not a cheap place to hang out.”

She had been there for just a few days in 2017 when the money she had budgeted for the trip was gone. She longed to stay an extra day to have a chance to meet Jason Jackson, then a sideline reporter for the Heat.

“He was coming in the day after I was supposed to leave,” she says. “I was hemming and hawing. Then I hit a spin on the slot machine and it paid around $400 or $500. And I was, like, ‘OK, I can extend my stay.’ And I’m glad I did. He has been such an encourager and an uplifter and a motivator.”

Audibert's big break came in 2019, when she got a gig as television analyst for the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream — a dream job. But that was only for the summer. She didn’t have anything lined up after that.

“September is kind of a scary time for freelancers,” she says. “You feel like you better start filling up your schedule.”

She was packing for the drive home – Atlanta to Niagara Falls – when she checked her email one last time before stuffing her laptop in its bag. There she found an offer to be a TV analyst for Raptors 905, the G League affiliate of the Toronto Raptors. (The “905” refers to the area code for much of Southern Ontario, including Audibert's own cell number.)

“My drive home was much more pleasant after that,” she says. “That was my next step up. You know, college basketball, WNBA, G League – and eventually the NBA. One step at a time. This way, I knew I had put in the work, and I was never put in a position I wasn’t ready for.”

She had almost given up on her dream a time or two.

“Usually, in the offseason, you take stock of where you are,” she says. “I was into my 30s. Most people would have packed it in at some point. I’m wired a little differently, I guess.”

Her father worked for the Niagara Parks Police Service for 35 years. Audibert thought she might be good at policing, too. She started making inquiries.

“It was really scary,” she says. “I had invested so much (in broadcasting). My time. My money. I knew I had the ability, but when you talk about the NBA, and 30 teams, the odds of getting somewhere are long. I didn’t want to be 40 and still in this position.”

Friends and colleagues assured her that she had what it takes: the talent, the voice, the knowledge.

“That was encouraging, but you can only hear it so many times,” she says. “My best friends were all married with kids.”

And her life was on hold. Then, Covid-19 put everyone’s life on hold. She spent a lot of time at home.

“Born and raised in Niagara Falls, and terrible as this sounds, I didn’t go to the falls that much. It was always crowded with tourists. But during Covid, I’d take walks along the parkway. It was kind of eerie, like that show ‘The Walking Dead.’ You could stand at the brink of the falls in the morning without a soul in sight. And it was the most beautiful thing. I have pictures of me and my mom with rainbows. I really started to appreciate the beauty of my own hometown when no one else was around.”

Her move from Raptors 905 to the Toronto Raptors – as a courtside analyst and reporter on Sportsnet – was seismic. When her older sister had worked for years waiting tables at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Audibert could see Toronto in the distance across Lake Ontario. It seemed so near, and yet so far. Now, she found herself courtside there for NBA games. The kid from the Falls had made the big time in the big city.

“Almost like a fairy tale,” she says.

Audibert almost always called her father before Raptors games. When she was playing basketball for youth teams in Toronto back in the day, he had driven her all over Ontario. Oh, how those two loved to talk hoops.

Last year, out of the blue, came the call to cover the Heat this season. This was an analyst’s role sitting next to Jackson, the encourager she had met in Vegas a few years earlier. (He had just finished his 18th season with the Heat, but his first as radio play-by-play voice.) It was hard for her to leave Toronto, just up the Queen Elizabeth Way from her hometown, but this was a bigger role. Besides, Miami is her college town.

“It is so hard to get a job like mine in the NBA,” she says, “but to get two jobs in my two home markets, that’s pretty incredible.”

Audibert thinks she never would have gotten the job with the Heat had she not played center at the University of Miami. She was team captain in her senior year, even though she didn’t get to play all that much across her four seasons because of a string of injuries, including three herniated discs in her back.

“Going to Miami to play, I think it led to the job I have now,” she says. “It gave me relatability to the local community of South Florida. Sometimes I wondered why I stayed when I was hurt all the time. Now I know.”

She had a plane ticket to come home for a quick visit at Christmas, but the storm that paralyzed the Niagara region – on both sides of the border – canceled that. She rebooked to come in around New Year’s instead. On Dec. 28, she called her father, as usual, to talk hoops before the Heat played Lebron James and the Los Angeles Lakers. The next day, her father died of a heart attack. John Audibert was 64.

“I kept the same flight I had rebooked,” Audibert says. “I came home not for the holidays, but for a funeral.”

The Heat told her to take as much time as she needed. She stayed in Niagara Falls for a week, then went back to work.

“I haven’t fully processed it, and won’t until after the season. I can’t let myself go there yet. But I like to think he’s looking down. He would have been watching all of these games, and we would have been talking about them.”

They would have talked a lot about one remarkable stretch this month when Audibert worked on Heat playoff games and on the first WNBA game ever played in Canada. The preseason game between the Chicago Sky and Minnesota Lynx drew 19,800 fans. Audibert did color commentary – make that colour – as a member of the all-female, all-Canadian broadcast.

“When the opportunity came for me to be a part of that, that was early April or late March,” she says, before anyone knew the Heat would still be alive in the NBA playoffs. “I’m grateful that the dates worked out, let me say that.”

Her voice held out, too: “I’ve constantly got my ginger tea and lemon going.”

Audibert's accent – “about" comes out as “a-boot” – was right at home in Toronto. Turns out it’s a hit on South Beach, too.

“When I’m down there I sound Canadian,” she says, “and when I’m home I sound American. I can’t keep anybody happy.”

That day when Audibert played the slots in Las Vegas was an outlier. She isn’t really much of a gambler.

“I mostly stayed off the floor when I was serving” at Fallsview, she says. “The thing I liked about serving was you always left with cash in your pockets. That’s more than most people who come to casinos can say.”

Still, it isn’t as though Audibert is entirely against wagering. After all, she bet big on her own career.

And hit the jackpot in two NBA towns.