Veteran sports journalist Lesley Visser will become the first woman to receive the Emmys' Sports Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Academy of Television Arts Sciences announced Wednesday.

She will be honored at the 41st Annual Sports Emmy Awards on April 28 in New York City.

Visser, 66, has spent 45 years in sports media, beginning her career in 1974 as a sportswriter at The Boston Globe. In her 30th year with CBS Sports, her career includes work with ABC, and she was also lent to NBC for coverage of the Olympics. She was the first woman to cover the NFL as her beat, report from the sidelines of a Super Bowl, present the Lombardi Trophy to the game's winner, work on "Monday Night Football," and be part of broadcasts of the NBA Finals, World Series and an NCAA Final Four.

She also was the first woman selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame -- one of six halls of fame to have enshrined her. She is the only sportscaster, male or female, to have worked on network broadcasts of the Final Four, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the Olympics, the World Series, the Triple Crown, the World Figure Skating Championship and U.S. Open tennis.

"For 45 years Lesley Visser has been a leader and trailblazer in both print and television journalism," CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said in a statement. "Very few people have had the word first attached to them throughout their career as much as Lesley, and even fewer have created a place in an industry that never existed.

"From first working in press boxes with a credential that read, 'No women or children,' to becoming the first woman assigned to work 'Monday Night Football,' and to being the first woman enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, there is no one more deserving to be honored as the first woman to receive the Sports Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement."