Fresno ‘Sports Central’ anchor leaving for Arizona after six years. When’s her last day?

Julia Lopez has been a known face among sports fans in Fresno and the central San Joaquin Valley for six years as an anchor/reporter for KSEE24/CBS47.

Just this year, she was a finalist — alongside Ralph Wood and Paul Loeffler — in The Fresno Bee’s People’s Choice Awards for best sportscaster.

Now, she’s leaving Fresno and headed to Arizona.

Friday is her last day on air in Fresno.

In an announcement on Twitter this week, Lopez thanked the community for welcoming her and said “the athletes, coaches and families I’ve had the chance to meet and cover over the years will always keep a special place in my heart.”

According to the tweet, Lopez will be taking a job with the sports team at AZ Family, a CBS station in Phoenix. There, she will be joining former Fresno sportscaster Nick King, who left KMPH Fox 26 in 2019.

“I’m not going too far, but I’m off to continue to pursue a lifelong dream,” wrote Lopez, the daughter of a former sportscaster, Ed Lopez, who covered Bakersfield in the 1980s.

“I’ve had some sleepless nights wondering if it’s the right decision,” Lopez told The Bee.

“But when I talk to high school, middle school and elementary students, I tell them you have to follow your dreams and if there’s an opportunity or a chance or if there is a door that is open and you’re afraid to take it, that is when you have to take it. That is when to do it because you just have to face your fears.”

This will be the second stop in Phoenix for Lopez. After college, she did high school football coverage at the station KPNX before heading to Greenville, South Carolina; Reno; and Denver. She arrived in Fresno in October 2015.

Around that time she had considered leaving the industry, but after a meeting with KGPE sports director Andrew Marden and shadowing him at a Fresno State football game, Lopez figured she would give it one more chance.

Lopez credited Marden and Scott Bemis for making her a better reporter.

“When I got here though, they welcomed me with open arms. They have been so supportive of me. They have been my biggest support system, just there if I have questions — and there is not a question that is a dumb question — and they wanted to see me grow and they want to see me get better. I never had that in my career before. It’s just a tight-knit sports department. I came here and they treated me on a fair playing field and I was taken aback and I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

“That is why I was here for so long. I wasn’t looking to go anywhere else because I was happy.”

She covered many sporting events, including her “coolest moment” — at the San Francisco 49ers and Minnesota Vikings NFC divisional game in 2019. Lopez was there to interview former Hoover High star Eric Kendricks. The Vikings lost.

“He was upset about it,” Lopez recalled, “but when we mentioned we were Fresno he gave us the time and day. He was very engaged with us, and that was just so cool to have that connection of Fresno and being from his hometown and covering him.”

Lopez will cover her final sporting event in the Fresno area on Friday when she’s at Deran Koligian Stadium for the Central against Hanford Central Section football Division I football game.

This is the second on-air personality to leave the Your Central Valley team in recent weeks.

Kirsten Mitchell left the stations last week after two and a half years.

This story was originally published November 9, 2021 at 9:53 AM.