Linear College Baseball Debut!

I'm not going to lie: I was as excited to do this game as any I've called in the last year and a half. I emailed maybe 100 people who have been instrumental in my baseball broadcasting career to let them know that I was *finally* going to call a college baseball game on linear TV.

That it wound up being a game with no implications in the standings or for either team's postseason chances didn't change that at all. That it wound up being ended early due to the 10-run rule didn't phase me at all. This was high-level college baseball, and my partner and I told the stories and put a good call on it! And I even got to use the home run call suggested by my children while we were riding the New York City subway.

Mission accomplished, as far as I was concerned, and cross your fingers with me that there is more to come. In the mean time, check out the highlights from Clemson vs Boston College:

#Clemson completed the sweep with another 10-run performance. It was the first three-game weekend series in which the Tigers scored double-digit runs in all three games since 2001 & the first time in an ACC series since 1995.

🎥 Clemson vs. Boston College Highlights ➡️ 5/18/24 pic.twitter.com/QYTWbp0Bft

— Clemson Baseball (@ClemsonBaseball) May 18, 2024

Friday Night Hoops: Wake rallies to beat Longwood

I started my college basketball season Friday night with the ACC Network call of Wake Forest vs. Longwood, and here's how it looked and sounded:

Condensed game (8:45)

Highlights (2:45)

Bleary eyes, getting JIP'd, and the power of one name

I'm still recovering a bit from my first Thursday-Sunday combination of the college soccer season, but I was fortunate to have some great moments to call.

To start things off, some early morning wake-up calls to get to and from Tallahassee left me a little sluggish, but I managed to squeeze in a short nap (a rarity for me) and get primed for our Thursday night Top-25 matchup between No. 6 Florida State, the defending national champs, and No. 24 Colorado.

Our network for this game, ACC Network, however, was primed for a different reason: the release of the men's college basketball schedule! The ACC is a basketball conference, as you may know, and the schedule reveal is a big deal, set to follow our 7pm game on a 9pm broadcast of All ACC. A college basketball fan and announcer, I was looking forward to it also, and I was quite happy to promote the show during our broadcast.

Then came the JIP.

JIP stands for joined in progress, and "getting JIP'd," in television parlance, means not coming on the air until the previous event concludes.

This was a major JIP. Soccer games typically last two hours. But college soccer games have overtime in the regular season, and this particular college soccer game had an injury, a sequence that led to an assistant coach being ejected, three penalty kicks, two video reviews (for no reason we could comprehend), and a team getting lost between the locker room and the field (seriously, it happened).

So even our regulation 90-minute game took us past 9pm, something partner Angela Hucles and I didn't realize up in the booth (see how happy we are!?). But we knew the score was 2-2 and we were headed to overtime, which meant some basketball fans were going to be screaming bloody murder.

Then I looked at the time during the commercial break before overtime and realized it was already 9:10 or 9:15, and we hadn't even started OT. We now had a sizable viewing audience that did not care know much about the first part of the game and, in many cases, was not enthusiastic about familiar with college soccer.

So I approached overtime with as much big-picture information as I could, reminding people that Florida State is the defending national champion, Colorado was unbeaten, FSU had dominated the game but only scored via penalty kick, Deyna Castellanos is an international star of sorts, and highlighted the key players on each team. It seemed to work:

Snark aside, FSU and Colorado are two Top 25 teams and @jtyardley is doing a very nice job on the play-by-play.

— Mike Waters (@MikeWatersSYR) September 13, 2019

But the big reason we left feeling good about ourselves is that we got an overtime game-winner! Everybody likes a walk-off, and Florida State delivered late in the first overtime to give us a dramatic ending and allow the majority of our audience by that point to get their hoops fix. Pretty cool moment to call:

Jenna Nighswonger called GAME.@FSUSoccer gets the W in OT! pic.twitter.com/xagYeaFvuH

— ACC Network (@accnetwork) September 13, 2019

To complete a sports trifecta, I scooped up an ACC baseball in the parking lot, presumably from a practice home run blast, so hopefully this means a return to Tallahassee for college baseball in the spring!

My Sunday game, with NC State hosting Furman, was nowhere near as dramatic, but we did get some impressive moments from Wolfpack star Tziarra King, who has the perfect Twitter handle for a one-name soccer star (@Tziarra) and is one of the country's most exciting players. Always happy to call a hat trick, always happy to call a run like this:

.@packwsoccer was down 1-0 early to Furman, but @tziarra and Co. were not having it!

Here's her equalizer in the 17th minute.

📺 ACC Network (https://t.co/b0ACtNFKPH)#GoPack // #NCState pic.twitter.com/gnXAlJbZaM

— NC State Athletics (@PackAthletics) September 15, 2019

Let's root for more heroics, more dramatics, and no more JIPs as the season continues!

New network, new role, new level unlocked!

As avid followers of this blog know ... I've been shirking my blogging duties. There are many reasons for this, but let's get past those and focus on not making it FIVE months without posting.

The news is that my role with ESPN will increase this year, a big professional deal that is more than three years in the making. It's occupied a lot of thought and attention and time, and it's really exciting to finally start. My focus will be on ACC Network soccer, with some professional soccer, college basketball, and miscellaneous odds and ends thrown in.

I'm not sure I'm capable of explaining what it means, after almost eight years of free-lancing, to have guaranteed broadcasting income. It's not a full-time deal at the moment (baby steps!), so there will still be plenty of free-lancing and scheming and job-chasing. But to earn and receive a commitment from ESPN and some people I truly respect and admire really provides encouragement and validation of work I've put in going back a long way, and it's something special.

I'm incredibly fortunate to have the support of family (nuclear and extended), and friends (old and new) in chasing, pursuing, and realizing this and other opportunities, and I really am grateful for it. This is neither the time nor the place to list everybody, but suffice it to say, Thank you.

Moving ahead, the fall schedule still has some moving parts to it, but it is well and truly underway with a two-game ACC Network week with games Sunday and Wednesday this week. Sunday was a special thrill and adrenaline rush, as Lori Lindsey and I called the second ever live event on newly launched ACC Network, and the first produced from a school control room. What's more, it was the first game at Syracuse for former Rice head coach Nicky Thrasher Adams, who I know from my undergraduate days at Rice, when she started her coaching career as an assistant. The emotions and intensity of seeing her new team pull out its first win was a welcome start to the season!

Missed last night's game? We got you covered. Visual recap of our 1-0 shutout of Colgate.⬇ 🍊⚽ pic.twitter.com/QN24kJOTTx

— Syracuse Women's Soccer (@cusewsoc) August 26, 2019

There is much more still to come, and I am hopeful of providing slightly more regular updates as the year goes along. But there's an ESPN paycheck in my bank account this morning, one I didn't have to submit an invoice for, and that's a goal I never felt certain of achieving.