There's no sugarcoating it: For those of us left behind from the initial rollout of the Apple / MLS partnership, it's a challenging time, professionally and emotionally. That applies to broadcasters, producers, directors, content creators, and many more. The uncertainty of the past 18 months has given way to frustration: No expectation of work covering the league I know best.
So one of the true bright spots for me so far in 2023 has been the invitation to contribute to the Philadelphia Union's radio broadcasts, which - it was announced today - will air on 97.5 The Fanatic. It's truly a joy to think about and prepare for MLS broadcasts, and it always has been, so I'm really excited to be back in the booth in a few weeks.
I lived in Philadelphia for about nine months in 2011-12 to support my wife's career, and while I knew it would be a temporary stay, it was a really important and special one in my life. Whenever I drive into or even past Philadelphia, warm memories come flooding back.
As far as Union history, I was there for Danny Mwanga and Andre Blake, road win No. 1, playoff appearance No. 1, and their first win at Red Bull Arena. I covered the Union a bit in 2012, but my connection to the club really tightened over the U.S. Open Cup runs of 2014-15. I called Jim Curtin's first game in charge and almost every game of Philadelphia's run to back-to-back Open Cup finals. I drove down on my own for the agonizing 2015 loss on penalty kicks, but you could see the culture around the club starting to change.
Over the years, I've covered the Union for many outlets (ESPN and MSG among them) and also had the chance to contribute with spot duty on Union broadcasts, both in a play-by-play role and as a host. On-air, I've worked with JP, Tommy, Peter, Jill, Marisa, Sébastien, Sheanon, Dave, Danny, and more. Behind the scenes, Carl Mandell and Jordan Strauss and Carl Cherkin and Dave Goetz and Kevin Casey and so many others have greeted me warmly at every stop.
The club's development has been incredibly gratifying to see, especially Curtin's steady hand, the emphasis on youth development (a personal favorite), and the game-day atmosphere! My last couple of trips - the 2021 playoff epic against the Red Bulls and last September's rout of Orlando City to set an MLS record for five-game domination - were truly memorable and inspiring.
So I feel both fortunate and comforted to go back to my MLS radio roots (it will sound much different than TV!) and contribute to this year's Union coverage. I can't wait to hear the Sons of Ben (in person!), witness the passion of players, staff, and fans alike, work with great people, and help punctuate some indelible #DOOP moments in 2023.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. July 29, 2008
Your big break. Sometimes you know it when it comes, sometimes it takes you by surprise. My first one was no surprise: I knew the stakes going in, and I knew I had to come through.
A 24-year-old in my first year as "Web coordinator" for the Houston Dynamo, I made no secret of my ambition to become a soccer broadcaster. With only low-tech college games for campus TV on my resume, I called Reserve League games into a stick mic connected to our one-camera shoot for the technical staff.
The record books show I had only called two such games when my break arrived: Our radio announcer would miss the SuperLiga semifinal to take his daughter to college.
I knew this was my opportunity to show I could do the job. Several of my bosses went to bat for me and convinced our radio partner to give me a chance, and after a few sleepless nights and a whole lot of butterflies, I was on the air!
The open was not exactly next-level. I don't think it takes an expert to tell that I was reading a written-out script as I said, "From Robertson Stadium, it's the rematch Houston fans have been waiting for, an international grudge match, as the Houston Dynamo host Mexican power, five-time Mexican champion Pachuca, in the semifinals of SuperLiga 2008. Good evening everybody, I'm Jonathan Yardley filling in" … Not the worst script in the world, but definitely sub-par delivery. But hey, it was the biggest game I had done as a professional!
Pre-game nerves, interview malfunction It was actually good that I wrote it out. I was really nervous, and to make matters worse, I'm pretty sure this was the game where I recorded a pre-game interview with Dominic Kinnear on my tape recorder, only to get back up to the press box and realize I had cut the interview off after about 5 seconds. Mortified, there was no way I was going to ask Dom for a re-do, so I anxiously waited for the players to arrive and squeezed in a few minutes with the always accommodating and insightful Craig Waibel.
So I was definitely nervous. The good thing was, I had plenty of tape on Pachuca and was really familiar with their personnel, so even if my Mexican pronunciations needed work (Marioni should be mar-ee-OH-nee, not MARE-ee-oh-nee), I had gained a lot of confidence by the time the second half and most of the game's key moments came along.
It really was a rivalry with Pachuca, because the 2007 Champions' Cup semifinal series (Pachuca won the second leg 5-2 in extra time to win 5-4 on aggregate) was incredibly intense, and that year's SuperLiga semifinal was a classic as well. There's a lot of schtick now about SuperLiga, but the tournament was a big deal for us at the time.
How'd I do?
Listening back to this, I'm proud of some of the little details I worked in, such as, "Dynamo going right to left, if you're familiar with Robertson Stadium, attacking toward El Batallon." This is a little thing, a radio detail, but it's something I still enjoy on TV - finding a unique way to indicate one end of the stadium.
I don't put much stock in prepared goal calls, so I didn't know what I would say, but you'd better believe I did not want the game to end 0-0. If you're going to earn a job or at least put together a good demo from one game, you need goals! So I was sweating a little extra (Houston in July? Yeah, it was muggy.) when it was still 0-0 at the 75-minute mark.
As Kei Kamara wins the corner, take a second to appreciate that the 2008 Dynamo had Brian Ching, Chris Wondolowski, and Kei Kamara on the same roster. Ching (82 career MLS goals) was clearly the centerpiece at the time, but Wondo (161) and Kei (128) have gone on to incredibly prolific scoring runs. Wondo, Ricardo Clark, Stuart Holden, Geoff Cameron, and Brad Davis all went to the World Cup for the US, and Pat Onstad and Dwayne De Rosario are two all-time MLS greats -- this team was stacked!
On the corner kick, note the clarity in saying how many corners the Dynamo had taken (hat tip to JP Dellacamera for instilling that in me early) and me getting the sponsor read in. Not an easy thing to remember in your first game!
Now remember how I said I don't really prepare goal calls? Yeah, I think it showed on both of these goal calls. "De Rosario .. bends it in near post, Waibel deflected, Boswell buries it!" That's all good stuff. But it needed one or two more lines to punctuate the moment before laying out.
Similarly, on the second goal, my call of the build-up was all good and technically correct, and it comes through OK: "Brian Mullan on the right, cutting toward the end line. Mullan gets there, chips it .. Corey Ashe buries it! Corey Ashe has put it away, 87th minute!" Probably could have used a little something more there, but we live and learn, right?
At least I got to make a crack about Corey's height after my partner, then Dynamo academy director and now Dash head coach James Clarkson, weighed in. I also got to give James credit for saying the last 20 minutes in the Houston heat could favor the Dynamo.
Good enough to get the job
At the end, don't mind me starting three consecutive sentences with "the Dynamo" at full time. Force of habit for a local radio broadcast, especially when you work in the team's front office. But I had gotten the job done (the team winning a big game sure didn't hurt!), and that was plenty to celebrate for one night.
That one game proved to be enough of a proving ground. By Christmas, I knew I would start 2009 as the radio voice of the Dynamo, and that was a true dream job for me. There have been more "big breaks" since, and hopefully there are still some to come, but that SuperLiga semifinal was a big deal in my career.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. June 26
I've had the fortune to have a string of memorable soccer moments on this date over the years. June alone has brought my first in-person pro soccer game (2001, Columbus), Rice winning the NCAA baseball championship (2003, Omaha), my pro debut in minor league baseball (2005, Yakima), my first game as a sideline reporter (2012, Philadelphia), and my first US women's national team broadcast (2014, East Hartford), and an England-Germany shootout (2017, from studio).
But June 26 has had more than its share of drama, and here are three with indelible memories.
2002
As a college-credit-earning intern for the MetroStars, my first game sees me spotting for broadcast legend JP Dellacamera and sees Sports Illustrated cover boy Clint Mathis returning to MLS after the US run to the World Cup quarterfinals.
In the second half, Mathis went to the halfway line and tried to check into the game, only to be sent back to the bench by the officials. I was one of the first in the building to know why: His name had not been included on the original lineup sheet!
2013
Maybe the best goal I've ever called, and it wasn't even the wildest part of the game.
First, watch Darlington Nagbe's run through the FC Dallas defense in the US Open Cup:
I didn't get every aspect of the call right, but "dancing in the box ... just blew up one entire side of the Dallas defense ... that was something special!" felt right on the money.
Now what was I doing calling that game? It's a long story. Due to my wife's job, we spent one year living in Shreveport, Louisiana, which was no picnic in terms of free-lance work. But with budgets being what they are and the Open Cup important but not a huge priority, the Portland Timbers took the chance to bring on a "local" fill-in rather than travel their regular broadcast team.
So I drove the three hours to Frisco, Texas, and set up shop in a very familiar stadium (I have called FC Dallas television broadcasts off and on since 2012). I knew Portland fans would want to hear their call rather than the audio of the Dallas webstream, so I had fun doing a radio call but also explaining to those watching that there WERE fans there, they were just on the near side of the stadium under the roof.
At any rate, the game was wild, as you can tell if you watch the whole highlights, but the Nagbe goal was just a sudden burst of brilliance that took your breath away. And surely the offensive assertiveness and aggression fans have always wanted to see more of from Nagbe, despite his high level in the midfield.
Not only was the goal, the game, and the finish great, but we had one of the great post-game quotes of all-time. The communications staff brought a microphone down to relay Caleb Porter's thoughts after the game, and he dropped the line that his players "continue to show me they have big hearts and brass balls, because they know how to get it done when the game is on the line."
I mean, really, that's a hard night to top!
2016
Three years later, I called more Timbers drama, but this time I was a seriously neutral party.
Any ESPN assignment is special for me, even to this day after 8 years working for the company at various levels. To call an MLS Game of the Week at Providence Park, one of the best atmospheres anywhere, featuring my former club, the Houston Dynamo, was just over the top.
And the game delivered! Goals, energy, back-and-forth ... and a little bit of controversy at the end, when Joe Willis was whistled for a foul that allowed Diego Valeri to convert his second penalty kick of the game for a 3-2 Portland win.
I didn't think it was a penalty kick, but partner Brian Dunseth and I ran into an ebullient Portland owner Merritt Paulson afterward, and he (of course) had no doubt!
Nothing too fancy this June 26, but we can hope for more drama in future years.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. April 17, 2015
This flashback also hits a round number, as it was five years ago to the day that I called the first English-language radio broadcast as part of the newly created New York Red Bulls Radio Network, one which is still going strong today!
While I wasn't working full-time for the club as I did in Houston, this was a chance to call MLS games regularly in my home market (I'm from New Jersey, and my wife and I settled in New York in the fall of 2013), and it was so exciting to be part of the inaugural season. I had television commitments that wouldn't let me take on the full schedule, but I was thrilled to take a good slate of games and share play-by-play duties with Ed Cohen and Matt Harmon that year.
Matt, of course, has taken on the regular role ever since, while Steve Jolley - who I remembered from my 2002 internship with the MetroStars, has continued as analyst. It's a great feeling to see those guys at a game or tune in if I'm in a rental car on an MLS game night and still feel connected to the broadcast based on that first season and the odd fill-in over the years.
Quick Start
But for me, Red Bulls Radio all started with a mid-March phone call to first discuss the possibility, and less than a month later, we were on the air with Game No. 1! Here's how the highlights sounded (if you really want, the full game archive is still available!):
Pretty cool, right? Five years doesn't seem THAT long, and yet a ton has changed since then. This was the fifth game of the Ali Curtis / Jesse Marsch takeover that stunned MLS and Red Bulls fans. While we certainly knew how they were going to play - you hear Steve saying, "The Red Bulls want to pressure high, hard, and often," and I'm already saying, "From a turnover, the Red Bulls do it again." - nobody at this point in time thought New York would go on to win the Supporters' Shield.
Future Captains Everywhere
It's also funny to see different Red Bulls eras colliding. You have Dane Richards, star of the 2008 playoff run, playing with Matt Miazga, with seeming ever-presents like Luis Robles and Bradley Wright-Phillips, and then you get the MLS debut for Sean Davis at the end. That was special for me to see, as someone who has spent so much time tracking Homegrown Players. I had called the Red Bulls U-23s' NPSL championship win the previous summer, so I knew of Davis and knew then that he would be turning pro after his senior campaign at Duke. I can remember Ali Curtis saying Davis could one day be "the face of the franchise," and Wright-Phillips sharing similar thoughts, and now, five years later, he is the Red Bulls captain.
I wasn't rusty, persay, because I had called the Red Bulls twice already for MSG that spring. But I don't think I had done soccer on the radio in two years, not regularly since 2011, so there were a few moments where the game moved fast for me. On the first goal, I gave Sacha Kljestan credit for forcing the turnover when it was clearly Felipe (as Steve pointed out in his analysis), which is embarrassing. They don't exactly look alike or anything!
Some Wondo Love
If you were watching, you saw all-time MLS leading scorer Chris Wondolowski on the Earthquakes bench to start the game, and he did play in the second half, but my favorite Wondo fact of the game didn't have to do with Chris. Steve Wondolowski, who played with Chris in Houston when I was there, went with my audio for at least some of the game and gave me, a life-long Oakland A's fan (long story for another time), quite a post-game compliment!
@jtyardley Great call tonight! Can't wait to hear you calling our A's games when Korach retires.
How Far Kljestan's Come
Lastly, I thought it was appropriate, somehow, that there were a couple faces in these highlights who also showed up in the Houston-Chivas USA game I had called five years prior. Firstly, Dominic Kinnear had moved back home to coach the Earthquakes, and I remember catching up with him before the game.
But one of the centerpieces in this performance, Kljestan, had a cameo in the 2010 game as the player Lovel Palmer turned past before scoring from distance. Consider Kljestan's five years in between: getting married, moving to Europe and playing 180 games for Anderlecht, including Champions League contests, falling out of favor with the US national team, and then transferring back to MLS with the Red Bulls. He hadn't lived as many places as I had in those five years (4), but he had been busy!
Last MLS goal for @SachaKljestan? April 24, 2010 for Chivas USA against ... wait for it ... San Jose. 4 years, 51 weeks ago.
Kljestan has had an eventful five years since, as well, winning the Supporters' Shield, reaching the rare 20-assst milestone, captaining the Red Bulls, being traded to Orlando, and now winding up with the LA Galaxy. Still getting used to that!
But it just goes to show, a lot can happen in five years, and I'm very glad I was able to inaugurate the Red Bulls' English-language radio presence back in 2015.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to 2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky moments from my career in sports.
April 17, 2010
2010 was, in many ways, a lost season for the Houston Dynamo. The club missed the playoffs for the only time in its first eight years of existence (2006-13), and it led to a lot of pressure, angst, and, ultimately, changes to both the team on the field and the organization behind it.
But that doesn't mean it was all bad. There were some incredibly cool and fun moments to that season, even if they did wind up overshadowed by the frustration of it all.
So I thought I would start this series of flashbacks with one of my favorite goal calls from early in my radio days, one that survived on my demo reel for several years, even after I had transitioned to mostly TV work. Houston brought in a Jamaican midfielder during preseason named Lovel Palmer, he scored a great long-range goal in preseason, and the Dynamo pulled the trigger on a transfer, paying his club Harbour View an (of course undisclosed fee) to sign Palmer.
Lovel Palmer! That's how you do it!
His first Houston start came 10 years ago today – April 17, 2010 – in the fourth game of the season, and when he pulled the trigger from about 35 yards away in the first half, firing a shot past Zach Thornton to make it a 2-0 game, I exploded:
"Into the middle to Palmer, with a man on him. Nice turn to get around Kljestan. Palmer, gonna shoot … fires! Finds the net! What a goal! Lovel Palmer! That's how you do it! His first start, his first Dynamo goal, and boy is he pumped!"
It's one I could watch all day, because of the goal itself and because of what I knew it meant to Lovel, an emotional player who became a fan favorite with every club he represented in his career. (As an aside, I ultimately learned to pronounce his name as LUH-VELL, with an accent on both syllables, rather than the luh-VELL I used here.)
So I went back to watch and enjoy the highlights:
and I found a lot more than just Lovel's outstanding finish.
Geoff Cameron, Easter Bunny?
Geoff Cameron scored the opening goal on a feed from roommate and constant odd-couple-partner Corey Ashe, then launched into a …bunny-hop celebration? What the heck was that? Was it an Easter thing? No, this was almost 2 weeks after Easter.
I really couldn't remember, so I had to Google it, and it started to come back to me. Geoff, a Best XI selection as a center back in 2009 but returning to the Houston midfield in 2010, had done a commercial for Volkswagen involving various elaborate goal celebrations, and his was: the bunny hop. Somehow he decided to bust it out in a game (he had also used it in the 2009 Dynamo Charities Cup), and I seem to remember all of us busting out laughing at the same time.
(As an aside, look at how wide-eyed Geoff is for this commercial shoot! I don't think he's acting when he's looking around on that pedestal all uncomfortable. And who came up with this campaign, anyway? Disaster or genius?)
Dom Oduro's "shoes are hot!"
Cameron did keep the shoes on for this celebration, which cannot be said for the day's third goalscorer, Dominic Oduro. After tapping a Brad Davis feed into an empty net from about 4 yards away, Oduro "play[ed] hot-potato with his cleat," a celebration I certainly had never seen before. When asked about it later, Oduro was quoted as saying, "My shoes are hot. It's going to be hot from now on. It's a goal, and the shoes are hot."
So our communications office definitely had a "shoes are hot!" saying whenever Oduro's name came up from then on. Of course, he proceeded to score 1 goal in his next 17 games …
A Moonlight Graham moment
This highlight reel closes with the debut of 18-year-old Francisco Navas Cobo, the Dynamo's second Homegrown Player and first to appear in a game. This was a big deal for the club at the time, trying to prove to anyone and everyone that the Houston academy could and would provide opportunities no other local club could.
Of course, if you've read this far, you probably know that the Houston academy is considered one of the least successful in MLS, and Navas Cobo never made another MLS appearance, one more cautionary tale of American soccer: We're all looking for the next big thing, but the success rate is low.
End of an era
My lasting memory of this game is just bliss: a 3-0 win for the team that employed me, some great goals and entertaining celebrations to call, and a couple of debuts to boot. But in some ways, it was the last hurrah for the great Houston(/San Jose) dynasty. The Earthquakes were MLS Cup champions in 2001 and 2003, Supporters' Shield winners in 2005, then moved to Houston and won MLS Cup titles in 2006 and 2007, won the West regular season title in 2008, and tied for the West regular season title in 2009. This was a juggernaut, pushed off course by postseason misfortunes in 2008 and 2009, but still feared around the league.
The roster on April 17 had six players who had been in San Jose, with two other starters injured. Yet one week later, on a rainy night in Chicago, Cameron ruptured his PCL, and the jig was up. Having already lost Ricardo Clark and Stuart Holden in the offseason, Houston never recovered in 2010. The club finally had to go younger, and so Brian Mullan was traded closer to home during 2010, and Pat Onstad, Richard Mulrooney, Ryan Cochrane, and Craig Waibel all moved on after that season, with Eddie Robinson limping through one more campaign in 2011.
The runs to MLS Cup finals in 2011 and 2012 and the Eastern Conference final in 2013 looked very different, with only a few names (Kinnear, Ching, Davis, Clark) who had celebrated titles in San Jose colors. So, in many ways, April 17, 2010 was one final day of belief in the promise of that era. And boy, were we pumped!
On Sunday night, I got to call what is my final regularly-scheduled Red Bulls game of the year (although I certainly hope to be involved in some postseason broadcasts).
That gave me a bittersweet feeling heading into the game, but the first 65 minutes of the game were so exciting to call that I just enjoyed the soccer, the atmosphere, and the feeling of anticipation for whatever was coming next.
As usual, analyst Steve Jolley and I had a great time calling the game, perhaps never moreso than on this spectacular Bradley Wright-Phillips goal late in the first half, one that has to be the favorite for MLS Goal of the Week and a challenger for MLS Goal of the Year.
I had a great time calling the third New York Red Bulls-New York City FC game on Sunday night. In an incredible atmosphere and in front of a sold-out crowd, the Red Bulls came away with a 2-0 win, giving them the series sweep of their cross-river rivals.
I've got two more Red Bulls radio calls in August, as well as a US Open Cup semifinal on Wednesday and hopefully more to come this fall!
With color analyst Steve Jolley joining me on the calls, here's what the two Red Bulls goals sounded like, first from Bradley Wright-Phillips:
I had the great chance to fill in as the play-by-play voice of the New York Red Bulls on MSG for their first two broadcasts this year, covering for Steve Cangialosi as he finished out his hockey season with the New Jersey Devils.
I'm going to keep calling Red Bulls games, however, as part of the team's online radio network, which kicks off tonight when the Red Bulls host the San Jose Earthquakes at Red Bull Arena at 7 p.m. ET. I won't be calling every game, but I'll be calling about one-third of them, mostly alongside former MLS defender Steve Jolley.
This is a combination of my first soccer team (I interned for the MetroStars in 2002) and my initial entry into broadcasting: radio! I began my MLS broadcasting career by calling Houston Dynamo games on the radio for three years, calling one game in 2008 and then almost every game of the 2009-11 seasons. It's a very different style of calling games than television (you talk a lot more!), and I enjoy them both, so it's going to be neat to mix in some radio work this year.
Most of all, I'm looking forward to seeing more MLS games in person this year and to continuing my coverage of a team that's been really fun to watch so far. I've called two of the Red Bulls' three road games this year, and those games have had seven goals, including a 30-yard chip and a 90th-minute game-tying goal.
What will my first MLS broadcast at Red Bull Arena since 2011 bring? We'll find out tonight! The game is televised only in Spanish, so try turning down the volume and checking us out at NewYorkRedBulls.com!
So I feel both fortunate and comforted to go back to my MLS radio roots (it will sound much different than TV!) and contribute to this year's Union coverage. I can't wait to hear the Sons of Ben (in person!), witness the passion of players, staff, and fans alike, work with great people, and help punctuate some indelible #DOOP moments in 2023.
