by Gavin Gaddis
During Podcast Movement 2025 in Dallas, I got to sit down with Katie Nolan, host of the sports discussion podcast Casuals. What follows is our interview going over Nolan’s background, why she wanted to start Casuals, and how SiriusXM has factored into the business side of making sports approachable.

All right, so we start off with an easy one. Who are you, and what do you do?

Which is funny, you say it’s an easy one. Sometimes that’s a little difficult! I’m Katie Nolan. I am a sports culture / comedy host. I’ve worked at ESPN, AppleTV+, and I’m currently hosting a podcast called Casuals twice a week for SiriusXM.

You’ve done a lot of the various sides of “new media,” what was your introduction to podcast production?

It was probably back in 2015. Back then there were not as many players in the space, obviously. And it was sort of pitched to me as more relaxed, direct to the audience, less pressure, less formal conversation. Which resonated with me, because that’s kind of my whole thing. The formalness of TV was the only part of it I didn’t like. So with the podcast was sort of where we would go to chill and discuss things more regularly, instead of in a more stilted way, like they have to on TV. I remember at first being like, “people listen to this?” I quickly learned that, yes, they listen to it and it resonates with them better, because it’s like you’re talking to your friends. That was my introduction to it, and ever since it’s been my favorite part of the gig

How did your experience in online media and sports journalism influence how you built Casuals? 

This is, for me, the culmination of the experience I’ve had in sports media. Like you said, I’ve done a lot of different stuff. I’ve kind of come at it from a bunch of different angles, just trying to learn everything I can about the business as a person who came up as a sports fan and who started doing this on my own on YouTube. Now that I’ve had these experiences, I’ve let them kind of inform what I want my approach to be, which is that I wanted to create something that spoke to people that maybe don’t outright immediately identify as sports fans, but who have loved ones who are sports fans, or who have friends who are sports fans. People who have sort of felt kind of mystified by the process and felt not included. 

I wanted to include them and say “hey, sports are for everybody. They rule, no matter how little or much you know about them. They are exciting and fun and live.”

I think the experiences I’ve had led me to wanting to make Casuals. There’s so few things left in the world that are new and different. I don’t think this is like a groundbreaking idea, but to me it felt like it spoke the most authentically to what I wanted, which was to be able to show up to sports as a person who loves many things. [A person with] a lot of different interests, not simply sports, while also bringing sports to people who maybe aren’t getting served them on their other podcasts.

What has it been like bridging that gap and selling sports to people who don’t know an offside from an RBI?

It has been so rewarding. I feel like the interactions I’ve had with people since we’ve started Casuals have been like, people being like, “My brother has always loved sports and I didn’t really get it, but now I can come to him with something I heard on your show.” I read something somebody wrote online, it was a blog [about Casuals] that said “Look, I’ve never understood why people care so much about sports. It’s just a ball and a stick and who cares. But I heard the premise of Casuals, and I listened. Now I know all about this guy who plays for this team.” 

That’s how I’ve always wanted things to be. I’ve always wanted to bring people into a hang and make people feel welcomed, feel like they’re not excluded. They’re a part of the conversation without knowing the intricate details of how baseball works. Because that’s like school, nobody wants to go to school. 

I mean, you do want to go to school. School is important. Kids go to school. 

But you know what I mean. You want a podcast to just be a hang. I wanted to demystify [sports]. It’s really early days still, but it’s been really rewarding. 

What has it been like having SiriusXM around for the business side of Casuals?

It’s awesome. Having SiriusXM has been so invaluable to me because I’m not a business lady. I never wanted to be a business lady. I like sports. I like being funny. I like hanging out with my friends and talking. I hate doing math and I hate doing the business side of things. I’m not good at it. SiriusXM is incredible at it, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time. 

They know how to reach the audience they’re trying to reach. They know how to target the right advertisers to get those people involved. They’ve got the channels to reach these people. They’ve got great they know how to make good audio. And they also allowed for me to have creative control, to own this property and to make it my own, and they believed in the vision from the moment that I pitched it. I don’t think I could have done this without them, and it’s been a great experience.

Sports podcasting is one of the fastest-growing genres in the industry. As someone who’s been covering and around sports for as long as you, how has that growth felt from your perspective? 

I don’t want to repeat myself and sound hacky, but the world is going a million miles per hour right now. Every day there’s a story that you’re like that would scare me for the whole day 10 years ago if I heard it, and now I’ve got to hear it right after hearing another thing that terrified me. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of different channels people are branching off into. You can become fully focused on whatever your niche is, but sports is the thing that still… you can’t know what’s going to happen till it happens. 

It’s happening live in front of you. You can witness the event occurring. You can guess if it’s going to go one way or another. You can, you know, make some sort of prediction, but you can never truly know – except, I guess, pro wrestling – you can never truly know what’s gonna happen. And we all find out together, and so many people have their emotions tied to it that like to be within a communal experience with people experiencing joy together or the other side of things, but experiencing moments like that together. 

There’s so few times where I feel like we get to have that and sports being like the last bastion of that makes sense to me. So I think it makes perfect sense that sports podcasting is growing and that sports is growing that way. Also we finally acknowledged that women also play sports, so that probably helps with the boom that’s being experienced. Right? But to me, that’s all good things like this is a gathering place. The goal of Casuals is to be like, “Look, you might not think it’s for you, but this space is for you.” So the more people we can get in the door, the better, in my opinion. I’m happy to be a part of it, a tiny little part of it.

Now for the big question: what are you listening to these days? 

Every now and then I’ll hear someone go like, This podcast is great, and then I’ll just add it and get to it eventually. And the one I’m doing that with currently is called Finding Drago. For podcast I listen to, I listen to The Dollop. Gareth makes me laugh so hard, he’s so funny. 

Then there’s This American Life, Search Engine, Podcast: The Ride, Decoder Ring, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,  and obviously I have the Taylor Swift New Heights episode. Everybody had to listen to that. I like it a lot more than I thought I would.