LONG POND -- Shannon Spake grew up in football country. Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Any kind of motorsports was far from her mind.

Jamie Little has been a motorsports fan since she was 13. But, it was the two-wheel variety. Specifically, moto cross.

On Sunday afternoon, the two women will tell a national television audience why their favorite driver is no longer in the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500 or why another driver is on track to win.

Spake and Little are ESPN pit reporters for the network's live broadcasts of the NASCAR Sprint Cup series. ESPN took over the race coverage last week from TNT, which had previously succeeded Fox.

"It was all stick and ball, mainly college football," Spake said this week while working at Long Pond, where the next race is scheduled for 1 p.m. "I was a huge NFL fan, a huge college football fan when I was growing up."

She recalled that while living in New York, where she moved after graduating from college (from Florida Atlantic University), she once saw popular NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. walking down the street in Manhattan and wondered what he was doing there. "I didn't realize it was (awards) banquet time."

She later moved to Charlotte, N.C., the mecca for NASCAR fans, and worked for the local Fox affiliate, WCCB. "Living in Charlotte and working in sports, you have no choice but to cover NASCAR. For me, being a sports fan, it was a whole new world opened up to me and really exciting because I got to learn a whole new sport and I fell in love with it," Spake said.

And she needed to bone up on her new sport as well.

Spake, who thought she would be working with the NFL in some capacity, said, "When I started with Speed Channel (in 2005), I think I locked myself in my house for three months, eight hours a day, 10 hours a day. It was research, research, research. I literally locked myself in my room and then one day I kind of realized that, Yeah, I kind of do know what I'm talking about.'"Š''

Little grew up covering and even participating in dirt track racing and became the first woman pit reporter on national telecasts of moto cross. That eventually led to becoming a pit reporter on IndyCar Series races and the first woman pit reporter for the Indy 500.

She soon began watching NASCAR races and her interest in that sport was piqued.

"I started seeing NASCAR and the more I saw NASCAR the more I thought Wow, NASCAR is somewhere I'd really love to be,'"Š'' she said.

Little dreamed of making it into NASCAR as a television reporter by age 30, and at age 29 she was there.

After covering the Summer and Winter X Games, supercross, moto cross and IndyCars, she joined ESPN's NASCAR team in 2007. The 2001 San Diego University grad also worked for NBC, TNN and Speed Channel.

Spake has also worked in a variety of capacities for HBO, MTV, VH-I, HBO and CBS.