I have started my second season of announcing college basketball. (With games on this radio station tonight and Saturday afternoon.)

 

 

My first three games featured a double-overtime win and two one-point losses (the last two of which featured comebacks from double-digit deficits), so I’m already 3-for-3 in terms of exciting games to announce. (Or, if you count the one UWP football game I announced earlier this year, 4-for-4.)

Those who announce for teams know that their professional lives are better when their employer is winning. In general, though, you want to announce an exciting game, because that means people will listen and watch instead of tuning out from the last part of a blowout. (The broadcast outlet wants to make sure all the ads are run, but a close game means more listeners to those ads.)

The first and third games were sort of flashback experiences. (Without bad acid.) The first game was at Lake Forest College, where I had not been since 2001, the last time until last year I had announced college basketball on the radio. Lake Forest has a really warm gym because the gym is in front of the swimming pool and the broadcast position is near the ceiling.

I was told there hadn’t been a radio announcer there in a few years. The Midwest Conference streams its football and basketball games, using the home announcers. This gets games online,  which is good, but that could subject a fan of the road team to outrageous home-team announcer bias, which I tried not to do. (In the last high school football game I did this year, my partner and I got complimented by someone in the press box for being fair to the team we weren’t covering. That also happened when I did a Lake Forest-Ripon game a few years ago.) There is also something to be said about being able to hear games on the radio, something that hasn’t happened in Ripon for more than a decade.

The last time I was at Lake Forest, with my late friend and broadcast partner, I announced the game despite feeling unwell as the game went on. (It was not the kind of unwellness that beset me during a high school football game I covered 27 years ago, when I had to leave the press box during overtime to return my lunch in the opposite direction.) Ripon College lost, and I proceeded to feel worse for several days (not because of the result) until I finally went to my doctor and was quickly diagnosed with pneumonia, a couple weeks after our oldest son had spent three days in the hospital with the RSV virus and pneumonia. I didn’t go to the hospital, and I felt just fine six weeks later. (It was just as well Ripon lost, at least from my perspective, because I probably would have been too sick to do any of their other games. My prescriptions included cough syrup with codeine, which subtracts 50 points off my IQ.)

Three nights after Saturday’s Lake Forest trip, I announced UW-Platteville against Ripon, which is one of the few times I’ve announced a team that is, to quote a former broadcast partner of mine, now “the bad guys.” (Which Ripon is not; they’re just, to quote that partner, “on the other side.”) None of the Red Hawks nor their coach were there when I last announced Ripon online and on cable TV in 2012.

(Speaking of which: My announcing games online included football games between Ripon and Beloit College. Beloit had a quarterback and wide receiver named Joe Davis, and I’m pretty sure I covered his games. I bring this up only because the Los Angeles Dodgers hired Davis to announce and possibly replace Vin Scully after he retires next year. Davis apparently announced Beloit basketball as a student while I was announcing Ripon basketball.)

Two tall freshmen stood out, and not just because they were tall. Ripon’s Maggie Oimoen won a state title in her last high school game, playing for Barneveld. So I got to announce Oimoen’s last high school game and first college game. (That was also the last game for Barneveld coach Jim Myers, the winningest high school girls basketball coach in state history. Myers now coaches the Barneveld boys; his replacement, Doug Pickarts, was two years ahead of me at Madison La Follette, and we were in the same Boy Scout troop.)

The other player provided a first as well. Thanks to my uncommon last name,  and the disconnection between athletic talent on that side of my family and my announcing avocation, I never got to announce a player with my last name until UW-Platteville’s Alison Prestegaard, of Amboy, Ill., checked in, and then got a rebound, and then scored, ending up with eight points, four rebounds and five blocked shots. It was weird indeed to hear my own last name repeatedly announced accompanied by cheering. (As opposed to just hearing my last name announced in my UW Band days, a notice I had screwed up something.)