There’s twists, turns, but in the end, things have a funny way of working themselves out…
The last time I blogged in this space I was forthright about my desire to broadcast again after not being able to do so in my first year at St. Thomas. After all, I spent my first 10 years professionally with a determined desire to make a career out of calling games, so to uproot those plans literally, figuratively and geographically was a gigantic decision that was unlikely to leave broadcasting in my mind’s rear-view, at least not right away.
But even I, hopeful to return to the mic but contented with my new, challenging role, couldn’t have predicted that just one year later I’d have a reel to share from a familiar side of the camera.
What led me back here? A conundrum I needed to solve.
Shortly after writing the blog just below this one, St. Thomas began to look into adding a television partner. After returning only poor options from a third-party consultant, I inserted myself into the conversation and suggested we approach Fox 9, the local station we had done a TV broadcast with a few months earlier. I got the ball rolling on conversations and, alongside my boss Jason, quickly discerned this to be a much better option than the one presented by the aforementioned consultant.
While it was an exciting revelation, it presented a monsoon of questions, one of which was how we would be able to pull off a television partnership in which we produced the games (this is the direction almost every non-pro/Power 4 has gone - schools/entities producing games themselves and the television partner simply providing the platform) with a radio deal already in place and no space to add a second broadcast crew we could dedicate to TV. Going from Division III to Division I, as it turns out, has its drawbacks, facilities central among them.
After approaching this quandary from a variety of angles, talking to tons of folks and trying to poke holes in what I thought was the best solution, we eventually landed back on the first option that came to mind months earlier - we would work around our radio format by pre-producing pregame and halftime/intermission shows to cover what radio was doing with what we needed on the TV side.
Why? Radio has a pregame show of their own that starts well ahead of the game, while TV starts at the top of the hour (usually 2-5 minutes before the game starts). In order to keep a succinct radio broadcast (and to ensure we don’t have the very precise and difficult task of meeting up with radio at the exact second we would need to avoid joining our broadcaster mid-sentence with no context) we need to have our own “pregame show” so our TV broadcast creates the illusion it is 100 percent dedicated to TV, not simulcast as it is in reality. The same goes for halftimes and intermissions.
Here’s a real life example: if a game starts at 7:05, radio’s pregame starts at 6:45 and TV plays their broadcast open at 7:00. Rather than head straight to the radio call, which would undoubtedly be in commercial or in the middle of talking about something the TV viewers wouldn’t have heard the beginning of (unless we joined them PERFECTLY every time, which to reiterate, was/is a statistical impossibility), build in your broadcast open to a pre-produced pregame show that is cut days, or even weeks, ahead of time. This is planned to go until about 30 seconds before the game starts, meaning radio would be scene setting for the game, and as long as the studio host gives some kind of connector between the TV side and the kick to the play-by-play man (i.e. “alright the stage is set, now to Schoenecker Arena with the call of tonight’s action, here’s Voice Of The Tommies Corbu Stathes) we’ve avoided any silence or awkwardness or out-of-context lead up to the game. Again, halftimes and intermissions almost mirror this, with only the content and timing differing - play-by-play voice wraps action, does an interview with a coach, kicks to break and what comes back on the other side of the commercial? The radio halftime/intermission on the radio side, the pre-produced studio show on the TV side. At the end of the pre-produced halftime/intermission content is a built-in kick back to radio with a minute or so remaining before play resumes (give or take 30 seconds depending on how long the pre-produced content is and how long it took for the folks in-arena to start the halftime/intermission clock). As I’m sure is apparent by this longwinded explanation, there are a ton of moving parts, this solution the one that had the lowest potential of complete disaster technologically, the number one thing we were looking to avoid in this highly-visible venture.
Next question now that we know we’ll go the studio show direction - who is the studio host? Well, having thought about this backwards and forwards, having a long history of on-air roles and, if we’re honest, being a bit of a control freak, who better (at least in my own mind) than me to fill this role.
OK, so we have our solution (albeit an adequate-at-best one in the host chair), but what do we fill the time with? If we’re recording these things weeks ahead of time (and that was often the case), how do we make sure things make sense on game night? Another riddle inside of this already-perplexing situation. The answer was an intricate balance of generic and current, with some sleight of hand thrown in.
Football was our first sport up, and we actually recorded the studio sessions in AUGUST. These lasted us all the way through the end of OCTOBER, so we needed to be spot on with these segments to ensure we didn’t have to go back into studio and re-record. We’d rest on history in the pregames, outlining last year’s success for the Tommies (which included a conference championship) and previous matchups with opponents. This made sense, something that couldn’t change because it had already happened but was still relevant to the matchup in question. Halftime there were two full segments to fill, and we wanted to run some human interest and feature pieces from the team and athletic department. That would take segment one of each halftime, but segment two was proving tricky. You can’t go through an entire football halftime and only do non-game related things, so we’d do stats. The studio host obviously wouldn’t know what the stats are since this was recorded months ahead of time, but this is a great chance to lean into wider statistical trends - “As you look at our first half stats, St. Thomas has long been a great team on the ground and that’s shown consistently against Moorhead State in their previous matchups, they seemed to have the upper hand in that category entering the afternoon”. Some context from the past while the graphic on-screen did the talking about the present. This workaround proved effective, and we’d do similar things during basketballs and hockeys as the partnership wound towards its conclusion.
A brain teaser of a project to be certain, and this was only one layer of the entire thing! Instead of boring you with the others, I’ll just say it was exhilarating to own this big piece of the St. Thomas expansion from partner identification to contract negotiation to broadcast execution to front-facing figure of the partnership. The back-end stuff is what you don’t see (and is quite honestly the most painstaking part of the entire deal), here’s some of what viewers DID see:
Our studio host setup is just a temporary workaround until Lee & Penny Anderson Arena comes online (scheduled for Fall 2025), giving us room for a broadcast crew we can dedicate strictly to television and streaming (oh yeah, we did this for every STREAMED football, men’s basketball and men’s hockey game too, almost 40 broadcasts!), so I won’t get too comfortable being back on-air, but this was a fun foray back in front of the camera. Maybe one day I’ll call another game or two, as that’s something I still haven’t done since coming to St. Thomas, but whether I do or not, I’m appreciating every moment I have to reconnect with something I always wanted to make a career of.