Courtesy New York Times

(May 14, 2008) After years of televising taped versions of “SportsCenter” in the mornings, ESPN announced Tuesday that the studio show would be live starting in August.

“We literally decided three or four months ago to do it when someone in a meeting brought it up,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content. A live morning “SportsCenter” had never been produced, he said, “for no other reason than that we didn’t think of it.”

The early editions of “SportsCenter” will be seen in three-hour blocks: 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern, 9 a.m. to noon, and noon to 3 p.m. Hannah Storm, a former NBC sportscaster who recently left as a co-host of CBS’s “Early Show,” will be an anchor of the middle version.

Storm said Tuesday that she "had a lot of discussions with a lot of people at a lot of networks" before deciding to join ESPN as a "SportsCenter" anchor.

She will be a host on the new 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. "SportsCenter" show, which debuts on Aug. 11, when "SportsCenter" is scheduled to go live from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. The new shows coincide with the opening week of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Since 1996, ESPN's morning programming has been encore presentations of "SportsCenter" from the previous night.

ESPN announced Storm's role during a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday.

"I had an offer to stay at CBS News," Storm said. "I would rather not comment on any other discussions I had."

She said the potential role she discussed with other networks "involved many, many different things."

She said the offer from CBS came from the news side.

"It was a CBS News offer," Storm said. "It had a couple of different elements."

Storm, who turns 46 on June 13, was the host of CBS-TV's "The Early Show" from 2002-'07. Other than CBS, she has worked for CNN and NBC Sports, which employs her husband, Dan Hicks. (The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also contributed to this story).