On the surface, she was a wallflower, but underneath, she was a tiger hell-bent on clawing her way to the top.
Brooke Hundley — the 22-year-old production assistant who had a fling with ESPN analyst and ex-Mets GM Steve Phillips and then stalked his wife and son — was a quiet, awkward audio-visual geek in college before landing a series of high-profile gigs and then scoring a coveted position at the sports network.
“You only get one chance to shine, so make sure you’re ready for it,” Hundley wrote in a letter to a dean at Ithaca College, where she studied communications. “Networking is not sucking up.”
But the tubby temptress appears to have taken her “networking” to an extreme — into the bedroom.
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As she wrote in a sickening letter to Phillips’ wife, Marni, “He enjoys being with me because I have more of a passion and drive to really do something with my life.”
Classmates were stunned by the scandal.
“She didn’t really come across as the outgoing, social type,” said one schoolmate. “She worked hard and worked her contacts, but she was really one of the shy, awkward types.”
Hundley’s father, David Hundley, had a hard time fathoming what his daughter had been accused of.
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“It’s a bizarre story. I don’t know how she could known this guy. I’ll have to call her,” he said at the door of the family home in Colorado Springs.
While Hundley has ducked questions from The Post, she posted her mood on her MySpace page yesterday as “hopeful.”
Hundley studied business administration and television and radio production at Ithaca College from 2004 to 2008 and attended as a Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar, which is for minority students.
In her profile on the Ithaca College Web site, Hundley identified herself as Latina.
Before attending college, she worked as an intern in the media division of the Air Force’s Space Command.
According to her résumé, she worked for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” as an intern for five months in early 2008, while simultaneously working as an intern on a short-lived TV series, “Moonlight,” about a vampire detective.
Late that summer, she worked at ABC and then scored a job as a production assistant for NBC Sports during the Olympics in Beijing.
She began working as a production assistant for ESPN in September 2008.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg in Ithaca