This blog has been slightly altered and updated from a previous post (April, 2019) on another web blog; seems like a good way to resume blogging is by revisiting some previous writing.--RC
I want to tell you a story. Like many good stories, it begins with “Once
upon a time.” This story isn’t a fairy
tale, however, it is real, and it happened to me.
A good deal of my younger years were spent in far western Nebraska,
a couple of miles from the Colorado state line and about 100 miles from the
Wyoming state line. Rural. Distant.
Wheat farmers, rattlesnakes, six-shooters.
But the area also had a radio station, and when I
received a transistor radio (kids, ask your parents or grandparents) I became a
huge fan of that radio station. It was
like the movies: I hid under the covers and listened late at night when I
should have been sleeping, vowing that I would someday work at that radio
station.
And I did, several years later.
As a sophomore in high school, the radio station announced that they
were looking for part-time announcers. I
had prepared: I practiced reading stories in the newspapers out loud, set up my
own pretend radio station in my basement, even written to famous disc jockeys
about how to land a job.
I did land a job. In the course
of the next seven years I served (at various times) as a part-time announcer, a
full-time staff member, the program director, the news director, the trainer of
young announcers, and the sports director and play by play announcer.
After that I did part-time broadcast work while I taught and coached in
public schools.
In the late 1990’s, I began to look at sports broadcasting as my
calling as a full-time professional. I
started by doing radio play by play of volleyball, came to Kansas City and
founded the one of the first local cablecast sports broadcast companies, worked
12 years as the broadcast director for an NCAA college, started four online
broadcast networks, and piled up around 4,000 broadcasts of games in the KC
area.
At tiny William Jewell College
in Liberty, our broadcasts of games had a 22% higher viewership than the rest
of the conference’s schools, and they were schools in much larger markets: Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago.
I also helped to create the first NCAA
Division II conference broadcast network.
I can safely say that Jewell was the best broadcast network in our
16-team conference, and one of the very best at the NCAA Division II level.
Everything has a shelf life, unfortunately, and my time at Jewell came to an end with the elimination of the sports broadcast program for financial reasons in the spring of 2018.
I'm back broadcasting college sports now at North Central Missouri College. The time away from sports broadcasting, combined with the time missed due to COVID, has given me ample room to think and actually change my approach to broadcasting.
This blog is for sharing those thoughts.
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