Holly Bankemper: What to Know About Cris Collinsworth’s Wife

Holly Bankemper, now Holly Collinsworth, has been married to NBC broadcaster and former NFL star Cris Collinsworth since 1989. While her husband became one of the most familiar voices in American football, Holly built a career of her own as an attorney in her home state of Kentucky.

Their marriage has lasted more than three decades, across an NFL career, law school for both partners, four children, and a broadcasting schedule that keeps Cris on the road every football season. Here is what reputable reporting has established about her life.

Growing Up In Fort Thomas, Kentucky

Holly Bankemper was born in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, on December 23, 1963, to Charlene and John Bankemper, according to People magazine’s reporting on the family. Fort Thomas is a small city in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and it has remained the center of her life ever since.

She attended Highlands High School in Fort Thomas. Her connection to the school did not end at graduation. In 2019, she was named Highlands Alumnus of the Year, and she has served on the board of directors of the Fort Thomas Education Foundation, which supports the local schools.

For her undergraduate studies she went to the University of Kentucky, where she was a cheerleader for the Wildcats. That detail is a small preview of the sports filled life ahead of her, although her own path led not to a stadium but to a courtroom.

A note on dates is worth adding for careful readers. People magazine’s detailed profile gives her birth date as December 23, 1963, and this article follows that best sourced reporting. A few smaller websites list a different date in 1964, without stronger sourcing behind it.

A Law Career Of Her Own

After Kentucky, Holly studied law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and earned her Juris Doctor degree in 1988. She became a practicing attorney and a member of the Cincinnati Bar Association. Reporting on her career says she has worked in Fort Thomas and also in Longboat Key, Florida.

Her legal career is a useful reminder that the Collinsworth household always had two professions in it. While Cris played for the Cincinnati Bengals and then moved into broadcasting, Holly practiced law and raised a growing family in the same community where she had grown up.

An interesting family detail followed. Cris, whose football career had kept him away from the classroom, enrolled at the same law school after retiring from the NFL. He earned his own law degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1991, three years after his wife. Although he is far better known as a broadcaster, both Collinsworths are lawyers by training.

Beyond her practice, Holly has been involved in charitable work. She has served on the board connected with the Cris Collinsworth ProScan Fund, the non-profit the family supports, which promotes breast cancer awareness and early detection and also supports youth causes in the Cincinnati area. Her public role there, like her legal work, is steady and local rather than celebrity driven.

How She Met Cris Collinsworth

Holly met Cris in Cincinnati in the mid 1980s. At the time, he was a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals, and she was about to start law school. One evening she went to dinner at The Precinct, a Cincinnati restaurant that Cris partly owned, and mutual friends introduced them and set up a date. Cris later told the story to Cincinnati Magazine in a January 2001 interview.

The proposal, in July 1988, became one of the family’s favorite stories. Cris had hoped to propose with help from broadcaster Al Michaels during the baseball All-Star Game at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, even asking Michaels for an on air mention. Michaels declined, explaining years later to The Herald-Mail that an All-Star Game made such a plan too difficult. Instead, Cris proposed after the game, on a bridge over the Ohio River.

The couple married on June 3, 1989. Holly had graduated from law school the year before, and Cris’s playing days had just ended after the 1988 season, in which the Bengals reached the Super Bowl. Their marriage therefore began at the exact moment his second career, in broadcasting, was about to start.

Cris has summed up the meeting simply. In that 2001 Cincinnati Magazine interview, he described himself as just lucky to have met Holly, called her a really strong wife, and said it was amazing how much she could handle, particularly with how much he was away from home.

Raising Four Children, Two Of Them In The Public Eye

Holly and Cris have four children: daughters Katie and Ashley, and sons Austin and Jac. Katie, the eldest, was born in 1990 and studied public relations at the University of Florida. She has worked in sports media roles, including with CBS and NBC, and later with GolfNow, and she is married with children of her own.

Austin Collinsworth, born December 24, 1991, played safety at the University of Notre Dame and served as a team captain. He later became chief operating officer at Pro Football Focus, the football analysis company of which his father is a majority owner. Ashley, born in 1993, was a student athlete herself, running track at Harvard University.

The youngest, Jac Collinsworth, born February 13, 1995, followed his father into broadcasting. He worked as a reporter for ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown and then joined NBC, where he serves as an on site host for Football Night in America and covers events including Notre Dame football, NASCAR, the Indianapolis 500, and the Kentucky Derby. Football Sundays, for this family, are a family business in the most literal sense.

Through all of it, the family stayed rooted in Fort Thomas. Cris’s biography notes that the couple lives there with deep ties to the community. Holly’s school honors and foundation work show the same pattern from her side: the family’s fame is national, but its home base never moved.

Life Beside A Famous Broadcasting Career

Cris Collinsworth’s second career has been long and decorated. He became the lead analyst on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, won 17 Sports Emmy Awards across studio and game analysis, and was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2023. That career means travel every week of the NFL season, year after year.

Holly’s role in that story is mostly behind the scenes, by her own choice. She appears with Cris at major events, such as awards ceremonies and Super Bowl week functions, but she does not give frequent interviews and does not maintain a public social media presence of her own. When she is quoted or described, it is usually through family coverage rather than through any profile building of her own.

Some websites try to fill that quiet space with estimates of her personal net worth. There is no published financial record to support those numbers, so they are unverified estimates and are not repeated here. What is documented is simpler and more solid: a law degree in 1988, decades of practice, a marriage of more than 35 years, four children, and continued service to her hometown’s schools and charities.

In a sports media world that often treats spouses as background figures, Holly Bankemper stands out for the opposite reason. She had her own profession before the marriage, kept it during the marriage, and helped anchor the family in the same Kentucky town where she was born while her husband’s voice became famous across the country.

FAQs

Who is Holly Bankemper?

Holly Bankemper Collinsworth is a Kentucky attorney and the wife of NBC Sunday Night Football analyst Cris Collinsworth. They have been married since June 3, 1989, and have four children.

What does Holly Bankemper do for a living?

She is a practicing attorney and a member of the Cincinnati Bar Association. She earned her law degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1988 and has worked in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and Longboat Key, Florida.

How did Holly Bankemper meet Cris Collinsworth?

They met in Cincinnati in the mid 1980s at The Precinct, a restaurant Cris partly owned, after she came in for dinner and mutual friends introduced them. He was a Bengals player and she was about to start law school.

How many children do Holly and Cris Collinsworth have?

They have four children: Katie, Austin, Ashley, and Jac. Austin played football at Notre Dame, and Jac works as a broadcaster for NBC alongside his father.

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Final Thoughts

Holly Bankemper’s story is one of roots. Born in Fort Thomas, educated in Kentucky and Cincinnati, married in 1989, and still based in her hometown, she built a legal career and raised four children while her husband moved from the Bengals to the top of sports broadcasting.

She has never chased the spotlight that follows Cris Collinsworth, and perhaps that is exactly why their partnership has lasted. For readers asking what to know about Cris Collinsworth’s wife, the answer is a complete life of her own: lawyer, mother, school supporter, and the steady center of one of football’s best known families.

Featured photo: Cris Collinsworth – photo by Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons