Another year of me promising to blog more than once has come and gone. Incredibly, when it seemed I couldn’t get any more infrequent in this space, I’ve managed to go from April 15, 2021 to June 12, 2022 without any jottings. 14 months of empty blogging promises, which means I should probably stop saying I’ll blog more or just stop blogging all together. Will I? I promise…
To give you an answer sometime in the next 14 months.
As for the blog at hand, I’ve just wrapped my third full-time year and fifth year total at East Tennessee State. Baseball has concluded and summer has set in, which means it’s my annual season to take a look back at the year and it’s happenings.
A season I am instinctually terrible at.
Instinct 1: Focus on what could’ve gone better.
Instinct 2: Look in the mirror and say '“are you making the progress needed if you want to make it in this field?”.
Instinct Always: Question everything and focus on the negative, which makes this time of year tough.
Don’t get me wrong, holding one’s self accountable is something I find to be one of the most important things in life to achieve true progress and eventual success, I’m just generally not spectacular at finding the right balance of being accountable and being reasonable with myself.
BUT! In my constant battle to take the bad in stride, strive to learn and grow from it, and apply that growth, I was able to take some pride in watching and listening back to the part of the product I was responsible for this season at ETSU.
As I went through my basketball work I found lots of improvement from last season, putting out a more consistently solid call than in previous years. Baseball had an eventful campaign complete with multiple walk-offs, a 10-inning complete game, a three-run home run to tie with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and an immaculate inning, and while all of these events were firsts for me, I felt I handled them well while stringing together some quality innings throughout the season.
My biggest challenge, though, came right at the beginning of the year.
Football.
Having filled the play-by-play role for a game just three times in my life entering the season and only once in the last six years, there were five games for which I’d be on the mic in 2021 on ESPN+. As if that task wasn’t daunting enough for a relatively inexperienced football broadcaster, the aforementioned three games hadn’t gone particularly well, as I struggled to identify players, weave in narratives and give my analyst the setup needed to have us work as a team rather than as a couple of individuals rambling aimlessly.
No lie, I was nervous.
The question of how I was supposed to fix these issues without nearly any on-air experience in this particular role for this particular sport sat on my shoulders like an anvil. I was used to prepping for every other sport that I did, and the way I went about that prep always put me in a good position to succeed for baseball, basketball, soccer, volleyball and softball, but my experience with football was that I either wasn’t doing the right things or not doing enough.
Rather than chance it by trying to fix one of those two things, I set out to fix both.
I had never studied a roster to memorize numbers in any sport. That may sound crazy to some, but my experience has been that baseball, softball and soccer are slow enough to have time to look down at your roster and learn as you go, while basketball and volleyball have such small rosters and so few players involved at once that it’s hard not to know them by memory after a minute or two. Football is different on both fronts, with 22 players on the field at all times and the action developing so fast. So on game week, I grabbed both rosters, examined depth charts, and poured through names and numbers until they were seared into my brain.
While not typically studying a roster for memorization in other sports, I am fanatical about being prepared for games in every other aspect. For a two-hour contest, I’ll spend at least four hours on program and individual notes so I have something for every player and situation I can conjure up in my mind. For a baseball game expected to be three hours, prep time is at least six. The adopted rule I operate under is projected on-air time should be doubled in prep. 2 -> 4, 3 -> 6, etc.
Knowing this, a football game projected for three and a half hours should have me ensconced in meticulous knowledge acquisition for seven hours, but as I adjusted what I was doing in preparation for my first call on September 11 by studying rosters incessantly, I also needed to adjust how much I was doing. So I doubled the time I put in leading up to game day to 14 hours.
Insane or ingenious? Probably the former because I’ve never been called the latter, but by the time that first game came around, I was confident, which I believe went a long way towards producing a quality product not only that first night, but every game that followed.
Speaking of a long way, that’s exactly what ETSU ended up going, as they won their first six, 10 of their 11 in the regular season and eventually a playoff game to get to the final eight of the FCS postseason before bowing out to eventual national champion North Dakota State. The Bucs 11 wins stand as their most in program history, their playoff victory was just their third ever and their spot amongst the final eight tied their furthest advancement in the national postseason in the school’s nearly 100-year football history. A special season I feel so incredibly lucky to have been in the booth for.
The most thrilling day I had a part of was the regular season’s final game against Mercer, the winner taking the Southern Conference regular season championship and SoCon’s auto bid to the FCS playoffs. As fate would have it, the result came down to the final play.
That video, with the final play followed by aerial footage of the ensuing Buccaneer celebration, was viewed over a half-million times combined on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and the vast majority of the call was featured on the open to the FCS Playoff selection show on ESPNU. The original broadcast footage of the final moments can be found here.
As my time winds on here at ETSU, what I appreciate most is the continued trust placed in me to do new things. Every year I’ve been in Johnson City I’ve been given more opportunity, and those continued responsibilities make the gig invigorating. So, how’d I do with this year’s task? I’ll leave that up to you! Here’s some samples if you’re so inclined.
Until next time, whether that’s 14 days or 14 months from now, may YOUR biggest challenges hold no opposition to your preparation, process and final product!