Blog 2: Games in Phone Booths

This blog has been altered and updated from a previous post (April, 2019) on another web blog.--RC 

My good friend Tim Crone, who worked on TV and radio sportscasts with me for over 10 years, often says that I’d broadcast games from a phone booth just to be doing a live game broadcast. 

It's true.

It's funny that after all the play-by-play work I've done, at 58 years old I'm turning the corner and working more in helping others get a start by teaching and leading our college production team.

My current employer, North Central Missouri College in Trenton, MO has four teams that are traditional broadcast sports: women's and men's basketball during the winter, and baseball and softball during the spring.

It makes it nearly impossible for me to announce the 150 games or so a year that I was doing in my heyday, when I thought I was polished and sharp and interesting.  

Last year at NCMC, in our second year, we had the students to do multi-camera presentations during basketball season, and featured some student announcers (Jason Orr, AC Marion, Kobe Linder and Gabe Swann).

I'll be honest, it's always been weird stepping back and letting someone else call a game.  Maybe it's time for me personally; certainly it's time for me in my new role at NCMC.

I'm not sure what the staff is going to look like this year.  One of the things I believe in is putting talented people in a bus, then deciding where the bus will go; in other words, I'd like our students to decide where they'd like to go in exploring broadcasting, and build our programs around them.

Maybe we'll even find someone who would call a game from inside a phone booth.