Sports writer - Grant writer

Category: sports media (Page 1 of 10)

The Value of Conversations: Thoughts on Grantland’s Look at Sports Radio

“The readout from our sports-radio diagnostic noted the following: Hosts don’t necessarily maintain the air of swamis. Callers have been downsized or have fled. News updates are anachronistic. Why do we still listen to sports radio?”

– Bryan Curtis in his Grantland feature on national sports radio host Scott Ferrall

 

Having taken increasing responsibilities on a hockey radio show over the past few years (shameless plug here for Hockey on Campus, Saturdays and Sundays during college hockey season on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio), I have thought a lot about sports radio and its future. Reading the above quote in this weekend’s Grantland profile of CBS Sports Radio host Scott Ferrall stopped my eyes in their tracks.

Why do I listen to sports radio, and why did I start given that I’ve never been a member of the genre’s key demographics?

I feel completely old by saying this, but when I started listening to sports radio, my city had just one show for two hours on weeknights. That was it. I started actively listening as a 11 year old, while my friends were busy calling our Top 40 station to ask for the last gasps of New Kids on the Block and the new sounds of Mariah Carey. (Don’t worry, I also joined them in singing Emotions into my hairbrush (and having my sister ask me to please stop because I sounded like a dying animal.)

Every evening during dinner, my father and I would turn on the Bob Matthews Show on Rochester’s WHAM 1180. Our family dinners were spent listening to Matthews, a longtime columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle, and whichever guests he had on that night. My father and I would argue with the radio, but we would never call the show. I remember wanting to a few times because I had strong feelings regarding some football topic (probably that I felt they were giving Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Troy Aikman way too much credit for something), but my father always waved me off. “You’re a girl. They’d never put you on the air.”

I was a girl in the early 1990s, and because of that, conversations with my father and listening to Rochester’s one sports radio show were the only football and hockey content beside the newspaper I had. This was back when ESPN showed more sporting events than endless hours of SportsCenter, so it wasn’t like I had a plethora of talking heads to listen to. Never mind chatting about sports at school – there just were not a lot of sports fans at my creative and performing arts high school. I was an odd duck.

Even though sports radio was never made for me – it was made for men like my father, and still is – listening gave me a sense of belonging. There were other odd ducks like me who talked quarterback rating and defenses. Maybe, someday, I would find some of these people in person.

When I moved to Boston in 2004, I listened heavily to sports radio again because I didn’t know many people yet and thus couldn’t have sports conversations in person. (I guess I could have saddled on up to a bar and just started those conversations up with strangers, but I didn’t quite have that gumption.) A few years later, I spent weekend overnights at my then-boyfriend’s parents’ house, where I was regulated to the guest room. Nervous and unfamiliar with the setting, I kept the clock radio in the room tuned quietly to sports radio so because it was something familiar. The combination of my boyfriend’s mother vacuuming loudly as a family alarm on Sunday mornings while the syndicated NFL Preview with Boomer Esiason played on the guest room clock radio is a standout memory of my 20s.

For me, my listening to sports radio is so much rooted in finding people having the same conversations I wanted to participate in. In the Grantland piece, Curtis touches upon the idea that social media is now fulfilling that particular need. That’s true – for people who can engage regularly online. Not everyone can. Economic (the affordability of internet, computers and smartphones), generational (not everyone is fully comfortable with their online abilities) and functional (not everyone can engage with their smartphone or a computer at the their jobs during the day) factors make sports radio still an important outlet for a certain population of sports fans.

There are also times where sports radio still is the best way to have some sports discussions. On Hockey on Campus, the conversations our host has with some of college hockey’s legends are best conveyed in audio format. We could transcribe them (and will next season), but there’s always going to be nuances lost in that transcription. Jack Parker and Jerry York are quite quotable coaches, but their telling quotes lose that je ne sais quoi when you read them.

And maybe that really is sports radio’s saving grace. We may tweet in 140 characters, we may text our friends, but the nuances of audial conversation are still the best. What’s more fun – chatting around the table with your friends or texting? Do I remember tweeting, or do I remember laughing until my sides are sore at something someone said to me?  Maybe I value conversations because for so much of my life I couldn’t have them – either because I didn’t have people to have those sports conversations with, or because earlier in my childhood I had speech issues that prevented me from having many conversations at all.

Conversations still have incredible value to me, and that’s why when I’m in a hotel room alone on some crazy work trip, I always roll over and make sure the clock radio is on the first sports radio station I can find. Because sure, now I’ve got people in the press box like me, and I’ve got people on Twitter like me, but when I’m all alone, hearing those conversations still has meaning. There’s still a place for that.

The Three Part Guide For Getting My Pro Sports Mojo Back

Over the past few months, I struck out and applied for full-time jobs in sports journalism for the first time. I thought almost three years of writing for quality publications while juggling an unpredictable full-time job had given me enough experience to enter the sports media full-time. One’s first steps in a giant career change rarely go perfectly, and I didn’t get either gig.

Unlike the field of higher education, sports media job searches (when you get far enough in them) give you closure: they are kind enough to tell you why you didn’t get the job. My downfall: I can tell a Lutz from a loop, a back handspring from a roundoff, can analyze women’s college hockey and cover a high school tennis championship like nobody’s business…but over time, I had focused so much on the sports I was covering that I let let my major sports knowledge slip. My pro sports knowledge was excellent when I was starting out in sports writing and working for sites like SBNation, but now has been reduced to whatever I could gobble up after a two job day while falling asleep watching SportsCenter or its Fox Sports equivalent that sometimes has Gabe Kapler on it (I am not sure of its official name – I just call it the Gabe Kapler Show.)

When I first got that feedback, I went through the three stages of job-grieving:

1) Sadness. Woe is me, I’ll never get a full-time job in sports media. I should hang this up for good.

2) Anger. Who do they think they are, telling me I don’t know some sports? Who says being able to recite the last five years of Massachusetts high school girls gymnastics champions doesn’t count for something?

3) Honest acceptance.

The truth: by nichefying myself, I had been able to get the writing clips I needed to apply for full-time gigs, but by doing so, I lost touch of the topics I would actually cover in those higher level jobs. So I sought to find a balance between my current writing jobs and bringing myself back up to speed on big sports, while balancing that with an increased rigor at my full-time job.

How did I do that?

– Taking advantage of apps: I prioritize reading a few sports iPhone apps on the first part of my morning train commute. I read two or three items from the WEEI and ESPN apps, and then I’m allowed to peruse Twitter to seek out more articles to read. The habit I had to break was just scanning headlines and tweets, and not reading articles that dove deeper into subjects.

– Back to print: I buy a print copy of the Boston Herald most days and read the sports section top to bottom during both commutes and during a break during the work day. I make a conscious effort to read columns about the big sports I know the least about (golf and the NBA.) I try to save football (which I could read about until the cows come home) to last as a treat (like when you did the homework for your least favorite subject first right after school to get it out of the way.)

Reading the paper is helpful twofold: one to bring back a well-roundedness, the second is to note the writing styles of beat writers and columnists. Now that I work within print word counts instead of the word-length ambiguity of web content, it is helpful to read how other writers flourish within the limitations.

– Nix the music: I used to tweet about few and far between “sports radio days” in my office, which were occasional afternoons where I could listen to sports radio while I worked. Now, if I am doing work in my office and don’t anticipate too many interruptions, I always have one earbud in with sports radio on. National shows, local shows, local shows from other markets – I don’t care, I’ll listen to everything (but if you start chatting about repairing your roof instead of sports, I’ll turn the channel.)

I still love figure skating, gymnastics, tennis, and college hockey, but next time I apply for a writing job, I know I am far better rounded than I was during my first two attempts. It’s easy to become complacent and research and follow just the sports that you cover or like, but if you want to succeed in a tight market, you need to be well-rounded.

Just Stipple It

For some of us, writing and doodling are just easier. The Dean (my boss at my full-time job) and I are very alike in that way.

I’ve tried styluses on iPhones, and using an iPad to take notes in meetings, but nothing really compares to handwriting and illustrating notes yourself. Maybe this shows my age, but if it does, I’m fine with it.

The Dean came to me Monday morning with something he had drawn up that morning that he wanted to convert into a blog post. A hand-drawn blog post, if you will. He’s a former graphic designer, so of course a normal doodle by him turns out to be absolutely spot on. But he wanted some specific sections of the doodle to link to external sites, social media and Spotify.

He handed me the doodle and went off his day of meetings. In order to keep his doodle intact but still link out to everything he wanted, I turned to Stipple.

Stipple is a photo sharing site that allows you to upload a photo and place multiple links or text on a photo. You can then share that photo and its links on various platforms (like Twitter and Facebook.)

Here is what Stipple allowed me to do with the Dean’s hand-drawn blog post and links:

 
stippled-photo-49655085

 

 
Pretty awesome, right? The goal is to do one of these each day this week as a way to curate the university’s Senior Week and Commencement activities.

I can’t help but think there are SO many opportunities to use Stipple in both venues in which I work (higher education and sports media.) For example, the US Figure Skating Association (USFSA) loves to share athlete throwback or action photos on Twitter. What if they used Stipple to do so, which would allow them to link to a YouTube video of that particular performance or the skater’s athlete bio? Or even a link to purchase Nationals tickets?

What uses do you see for Stipple?

When Listening To Home Is As Easy As Opening A Browser Tab, Why Is Sports Radio Going National?

A Tune In Radio app screen capture full of post-related goodness.

When Buffalo Bills training camp began in July, Buffalo, NY sports radio station WGR upped their camp coverage. They added the John Murphy Show to their evening lineup, allowing the longtime Buffalo Bills announcer to report in-depth on a Bills team with great expectations.

I listened to the show’s first broadcast on July 26th while on the commute from Boston to Salem, MA from my iPhone via the TuneIn Radio app. I wasn’t alone. When Murphy took his first round of calls around 7:45pm that night, most of his callers weren’t Western New Yorkers, but listeners from North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

When I want to listen to sports radio, I’m no longer turning on a physical radio with knobs and an antenna, but services such as TuneIn. I am no longer limited to the offerings of my geographical area, and I “humble brag” as such all the time on Twitter. When I am able, I listen to WGR, Rochester, NY (my hometown)’s John DiTullio Show on 1280 WHTK, or even radio stations from the Midwest. Even though I have lived here for eight years, I don’t listen to Boston sports radio regularly, because half of my sports interests and allegiances don’t align with the geographic area in which I live.

And, thanks to technology, that is not a problem in 2012.

———

What is a problem is something I touched upon in an article I wrote in January for SBNation Boston: large media entities thinking sports radio should go national. The article’s Twitter length synopsis: Smaller regional markets are losing local sports programming in favor of syndicated national programming like Mike and Mike In the Morning and the Jim Rome Show. Continue reading

Tim Thomas: The Negativity Of Success And Plotting The Escape

Tim Thomas announced Sunday that he would take the 2012-13 NHL season off. On his Facebook page (Thomas’s equivalent of Martin Luther’s doors to the church,) the 38 year old cited three F’s for being the reason for his absence: family, friends and faith.

When read the news, the first immediate comparison I had was to singer Mariah Carey in 2001 (and I tweeted as such.) For those who feel that the comparison is crass or silly, I beg to differ. Both had actual issues with celebrity and the claustrophobia success can bring. Their declines hit public consciousness in very public forums – Carey on the set of Total Request Live (TRL), where she exhibited eccentric behavior while promoting her film Glitter; Thomas when he made a very public issue of declining the Boston Bruins’ trip to the White House.

When one struggles with the inability to reconcile their success with the expectations of that success, they may start to feel like they are falling down an endless manhole with no end in sight. They know what most of the public’s bare minimum for living a content life is – family, friends and a roof over your head – but success leaves them unable to enjoy those basics. Life becomes much more complicated, be it through things the celebrity or athlete can control, or forces that they can’t stop.

And while some who have achieved grand success can take just a week off to recharge and re-motivate, others can’t seem to stop falling down the manhole. Thomas seems to be one. He’s a journeyman who suddenly didn’t have to journey anymore. That end goal he had for himself to motivate him through years of discouraging European hockey was achieved, and as much as a second Stanley Cup and Veniza Trophy could be motivation, that’s like going back to get a second undergraduate degree in the same subject. The experience still could be meaningful, but the practice itself is repetitive. You’re not building upon anything, and there is no opposition to motivate your fight. Sure, other teams would get in your way to another Championship, but to anyone who explicitly says, “You can’t,” you have the hardware to bust out to prove that you did.

Thomas’s cure to the lack of purpose and the mounds of expectation that success brings – taking the season off – appears selfish. It is. He has a contract with the Bruins that he needs to fulfill. But the act of escape is one that every elite athlete or other successful person who has reached their life goal has wished they could do at one point or another. In an 1981 interview of Olympic gold medal winning figure skater Scott Hamilton, Hamilton frankly complains about having to stay motivated after winning his first World Championship, especially with having to deal with the negatives and expectations that came with it. “I was really hungry for (the championship) before. Now that I’ve got it, it’s really hard to stay hungry.” Hamilton continued on to say that not just the repetition of preparing for something he already achieved bugged him, but that now experiencing the cons of success made the success somewhat less desirable.

Thomas wanted to win a Stanley Cup. He wanted to prove others wrong. He did that. Now that he has achieved what he set out to achieve, what is the point of enduring the cons of success when you seemingly don’t have to? Contracts be damned, Thomas is going off to reclaim the bare basics of happiness. He has the resources that many others who need such a refocus don’t have – the luxury to.

And while fans can hate it, teammates recoil in it, and media gossip about it, there is some legitimacy in it. Thomas reached the pinnacle, found the spotlight too bright and now wants to avoid it in a cave. It’s the adult equivalent of hiding in the deepest confines of the closet as a kid when you wanted to get away from your parents fighting or your teething baby sister’s wailing. It was the only quick fix you could think of at the time, and provided you had a closet in your house, you had the resources in which to find the escape.

But eventually, you had to peak out of the closet to face reality (which as a kid, was either boredom or hunger motivated.) And Thomas will eventually have to peak out of Colorado (where he allegedly has moved) to face reality.

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