Nokuthula Mnyani Opens Her Own Doors in Sports Media

In 2020, with South Africa in lockdown, a final-year student living in Doornfontein emailed a nearby radio station to ask for a chance. No reply came. Nokuthula Mnyani did not write again.

“I wrote an email that didn’t respond, I was like, let me just go to Hillbrow Radio. I walked there, I met the manager at that time,” she says.

By her account the manager, Bongani Zikalala, liked her energy and put her to work as a sports news reporter. It is the pattern of her career so far. When an invitation does not arrive, Mnyani, known as Noks, goes and knocks. Six years later the same instinct made her a finalist at the 2026 gsport Awards, in a category she entered by nominating herself.

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Her story starts in Nhlazatshe in rural Mpumalanga, where the only sports she knew were football and netball, and where the television remote was contested ground. Her late grandmother, Maria Sibande, was a devoted Orlando Pirates supporter who wanted the football and the cricket on. Mnyani wanted the entertainment shows. In the end she sat down and watched with her.

A career in sport did not occur to her. At the time, she says, “The only thing I thought that time was it’s either you are an athlete or you watching the game”.

What changed her mind were the people presenting the sport. She names gsport founder Kass Naidoo, Carol Tshabalala, Robert Marawa and Thomas Mlambo as the broadcasters who made her ask what the job involved. The answer took her to the University of Johannesburg in 2018 to study sports communication.

At UJ she shadowed the university’s sports media officer, moving from cricket training one day to hockey the next, and found that what reaches the newspaper or the screen is the smallest part of the work.

“There’s a lot of work that goes behind the scene. There’s a lot of planning, coordination. There’s a lot of communication.”

2026 Special Recognition Finalist, Nokuthula Mnyani

Then came lockdown. Mnyani went home, battled for a network signal in her final year and obtained an affidavit so that she could return to Johannesburg. With her assignments done and hours to fill, she began researching radio stations near her residence.

At Hillbrow Radio, she says, she researched and wrote sports bulletins for the afternoon drive show, and after about a month Zikalala offered her a Wednesday slot of her own.

“I’ve always wanted to have my own show. I even had the name of my show, which was Behind the Pitch,” she says. “I was a little journalist there learning how to write sports news bulletin.”

Some days she was alone in the studio, choosing the music and carrying the hour herself. Lockdown kept her away from training grounds and media conferences, and there was no stipend, but by her account she stayed from about June to December.

In the same year she emailed Varsity TV. This time an answer came, and she began interviewing athletes for the channel by video call, never in a studio. She treated it as television all the same.

“I say camera. It was a laptop, but it was a camera for me. How you present yourself, the body language. I taught myself that.”

The years that followed did not run in a straight line. In 2021 she studied towards an honours in sports management at UJ, worked as an assistant teacher by day and spent her evenings as kit manager of the UJ women’s football team under football manager Nolufefe Sila, filming matches for the coaches. In 2023 she went home to Mpumalanga hoping to volunteer in municipal sport, found the programmes discontinued and spent the year as a library assistant.

The door that opened next was one she had knocked on years earlier. As a student volunteering around the Varsity Cup she had introduced herself to Busisiwe Ncapai, then at ASEM, and was told the company was not hiring. Two years later, Mnyani says, Ncapai recommended her to Sports 4U, and an email arrived from Tercia Brandreth-Mampane asking for her CV.

She joined the sports marketing company in 2024 as a project coordinator and is now a project manager, in a field of events, logistics and branding where she had never worked. The lesson, she says, was simple: “if you really, really want something, you can do anything that you want. That’s what I’ve learned. I pushed myself. I would ask questions.”

Brandreth-Mampane, the Chief Operations Officer at Sports 4U, has watched the change.

“Nokuthula Mnyani joined Sports 4U as ‘our baby’ in the team, and it has been incredibly rewarding to watch her grow into a feisty, driven and confident young professional,” Brandreth-Mampane told gsport.

Mnyani describes the same journey from the other side. “You know when you are helping a child to walk? She’s been like that for me,” she says.

The project she is proudest of is the Comrades Marathon, where she manages Wimpy’s presence from the Expo to the water point to the finish. Planning starts in October for a race in June, and race week leaves little time for sleep.

“You then go to the water point as soon as that first runner passes the water point. That’s when now you see that I’ve really did it. It’s happening,” she says.

Through all of it she kept her eye on gsport. She says she has followed the platform since arriving at university in 2018, messaged Naidoo on Instagram and applied for work at the Awards. In 2026 she stopped waiting.

“I’m going to nominate myself because people are not nominating me. Clearly they don’t know me. So they must know me so that they can nominate me.”

Her mother laughed. Then an email arrived naming her a finalist for Special Recognition, and in August she walked into the 21st gsport Awards intent on meeting every woman in sponsorship, marketing and broadcasting she could find. One mattered most: “the most important person that I’ve been wanting to meet in my whole life it has to be Kass and it really happened”.

The night sharpened her ambition. Mnyani wants to become a sports production manager, a role she did not know existed when she believed television meant standing in front of the camera. She sees it as the place where her radio, television, events and project management experience meet.

“I definitely know I’m going to be a production manager. Let me erase the if-if thing,” she says.

She wants more women in the rooms where sponsorship decisions are made, and she credits the brands already there. “Telkom is really doing a really good job, especially in terms of netball,” she says, adding that she would like to see sponsors like it draw others into women’s sport.

Somewhere, she is sure, a student of sport is wondering what comes next. “I’m 110% that there is a girl that now definitely wants to be like Noks,” she says.

For that student, and for anyone with a job to fill, her message is the one she carried to the studio door in Hillbrow: “we here to work if you need people we here”.

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Main Photo Caption: Nokuthula Mnyani, a finalist for Special Recognition at the 2026 gsport Awards, has built her path through sports media and events since starting at the University of Johannesburg in 2018, from a Wednesday radio show in Hillbrow to Wimpy’s Comrades Marathon work for Sports 4U, and attended the 21st gsport Awards in Johannesburg in August 2026. All Photos: Supplied

Photo 2 Caption: Project manager Mnyani plans Famous Brands activations for Sports 4U from October to race day at the Comrades Marathon in June each year.

Photo 3 Caption: Radio came first for Mnyani, who wrote sports bulletins and hosted her own Wednesday show, Behind the Pitch, on Hillbrow Radio in 2020.

Photo 4 Caption: Television followed when Mnyani interviewed athletes for Varsity TV by video call, the medium she calls her first love in sports broadcasting.

Photo 5 Caption: Sports production management is the goal for Mnyani, who wants to bring her radio, television, events and project experience into one career.