Their voices are everywhere during a basketball game — from speakers and from behind TV or phone screens, or perhaps, sometimes, as a companion during a solo drive down a long stretch of road. But the nature of game announcing and broadcasting is a bit mysterious even to the most dedicated basketball fans; even when an announcer is in front of a camera, they’re not necessarily front of mind for everyone who is watching (or listening) at home.
The SEC boasts a web of announcers and radio broadcasters who tell stories and paint pictures night after night during the basketball season. Brad Muller, who has been calling games for the South Carolina Gamecocks on 106.7 for the last 30 years, is one of many who parlayed an athletic career into something else.
Muller realized he wasn’t going to make it in Division I football when he graduated high school, but he knew he wanted to stay connected to sports. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in broadcasting in 1992 and ended up reporting the news on the radio in Columbia before he expressed an interest in sports. He moved to Georgia, where a spot broadcasting for a Division II women’s basketball team at a station in Milledgeville, Georgia, opened up.
“The first women’s basketball game I ever broadcast was also the first women’s basketabll game I’d ever seen,” Muller told The IX Sports. “That was in 1993.”
He approached the coach with a simple plea: “I remember going up to the women’s coach at the time, saying, ‘Coach, I’m your new radio guy, and I’ll be honest, I haven’t watched much women’s basketball.'” Muller, who attended an all-boys high school, hadn’t had the chance to even watch a girl’s high school game.
“And I said, ‘What do I need to know?'” Muller added. The coach’s answer was layups and free throws, “and I said, ‘What about layups and free throws?’ and he said in Division II women’s basketball, whoever makes the most layups and free throws is going to win.”
To this day, Muller says anytime a member of Dawn Staley‘s team misses a layup or free throw, he still sees that coach’s face “saying, ‘Layups and free throws.'”
Muller spent 13 years in Georgia before a spot back in Columbia opened up. He landed at the school one year before Staley did and has been calling games since.
The IX Soccer is here!
In case you missed it, The IX Sports introduced a new women’s soccer-specific vertical called The IX Soccer!
Just like The IX Basketball, this will be your destination for 24/7 women’s soccer coverage, including exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes looks at your favorite teams and leagues, as well as news from around the world.
Follow the link below and bookmark the page to stay up to date on the latest headlines in women’s soccer.
The idea of turning on a radio to listen to a basketball game is foreign to a lot of fans. Basketball is a physical sport, and seeing the game being played is part of the appeal for most audiences — but not everyone. Though there isn’t quite as much demand for radio broadcasts as there used to be, the audience is loyal, Muller explained.
“I have found that, especially among college fans, they are very loyal to their radio broadcasts,” he said. “I hear that from a lot of fans of all of our sports … they’ll do the old-fashioned thing of turning the TV on, turning the volume down, and turning on the radio to try to sync it up, because … they’d like to hear the people that know their team a a little bit better.”
To that end, there will “always [be] a need” for radio broadcasting, he continued. The difference is in the dynamic a radio broadcaster builds over time as they cover a team over and over again, season after season. A broadcaster is “someone who is going to know the home team a little bit more than a TV crew that’s only going to see them once,” Muller added.
Jake Lyman, who is in his fourth season broadcasting games for the Vanderbilt Commodores on 102.5 The Game, agreed. Lyman got the job after a fellow broadcaster at the school threw his name out for consideration; since then, he’s been building a relationship with Coach Shea Ralph, her staff, the team — and listeners.
“I think it’s obviously more of a TV world now, so a lot of people are going to tune in where they can actualy see the games,” Lyman told The IX Sports, “but I think there is still a niche audience that reallhy enjoys the team-centric broadcast.”
Lyman is around the team a lot more than a TV broadcaster typically is, which allows him to frame his announcing “in more of a Vanderbilt lens that I think appeals to a lot of people out there,” he said. “If you tune into the TV broadcast, you’re typically hearing, if it’s a national game, peopel who speak with Shea [Ralph] or the players for 10 or 15 minutes, but if you tune into the radio broadcast, you’re getting the local flair. You’re hearing stories about your team.”
He’s also allowed to celebrate the home team in a way a neutral TV announcer really can’t, Lyman continued. “I’m more excited when Vandy does well, and, you know, not quite as excited when things go bad, so I think that’s what the audience is looking for when they’re tuning into the radio.”
Listen now to The IX Sports Podcast and Women’s Sports Daily
We are excited to announce the launch of TWO new podcasts for all the women’s sports fans out there looking for a daily dose of women’s sports news and analysis. Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts, and make sure to subscribe!
While Muller and Lyman stick to radio, the SEC Network’s Ron Flay has experience behind the mic and in front of the camera. Flay, who played basketball overseas for several years, initially hoped to go into coaching. That didn’t work out, but a job broadcasting football games alongside Dawn Davenport on 104.5 The Zone did.
Flay’s transition from radio to TV was smooth. While at SEC Media Day in Atlanta he connected with the SEC Network’s Pete Watters, a multi-Sports Emmy winner who now leads studio production. Watters brought Flay into the fold and allowed him to get back to his first love: basketball.
The biggest difference between radio and TV is that in the former, you can “elaborate a little bit more [and] paint a picture for the listener, because you’re their eyes.” When he’s calling a game for TV, the job is more about translating what a viewer sees happening on their screen. “It’s more [that] you’re explaining more of why things are happening, and giving your insight,” Flay added. “I like to give a player’s perspective when doing TV.”
Television is quicker by default, but “when you’re on the radio, you’re telling a story,” he continued. “You’ve been kind of going into the details of it, knowing they can’t see, so you can’t leave a lot of things out … you can give [TV viewers] three to four seconds, but when you’re on radio, you can take two or three minutes. It doesn’t matter.”
Working in both broadcasting and announcing has reconnected Flay to a sport he loves, and in a lot of ways, he treats announcing the same way he used to treat a basketball game. ” I remember watching while growing up,” he said, “You know, we always remember punch lines [from announcers]. You always remember the excitement from the announcers. You remember moments, and you can kind of line those moments up with games and kind of tell what happened.”
That’s an energy he now enfuses into his own announcing. “And I think the energy more so than anything is one of the things I always try to get across,” Flay continued, “and I also want to be able to have it feel like you’re watching the game at home with me on the couch, having a good time.”
“I get the same adrenaline rush as I did as a player going into these environments, especially in the SEC,” he added. “So the only good thing is after the game, you don’t have a emotional attachment to the game. Once they win or lose, it is what it is. You did your job, you had fun. You get to go home and go to sleep. It used to be way more difficult to fall asleep after games as a player.”
Listen now to The IX Sports Podcast and Women’s Sports Daily
We are excited to announce the launch of TWO new podcasts for all the women’s sports fans out there looking for a daily dose of women’s sports news and analysis. Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts, and make sure to subscribe!