YH: When you first started sports broadcasting, was it like anything you had ever done before?
EF: You compare it a little bit to public speaking, thinking, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to be on the air for three, four hours at a time.” But in the end you discover it’s more just like having a conversation with somebody, and you’re not really seeing the people, and it’s not like giving a rehearsed speech.
YH: Do you usually broadcast alone or with a partner?
EF: When we’re doing hockey or basketball for a standard regular season game, there’s one guy who’s the play-by-play commentator, who’s really going through what the main action is, describing the actual play, describing score, time, all of that. And then there’s the color commentator, the second one, and that’s the person giving the extra analysis, going into detail, describing things that may not have been brought up by the play-by-play commentator. For the Frozen Four, we definitely expanded our team a little bit. We had a special pregame host and a special intermission host.
YH: Were those also people from Yale?
EF: Yes. That’s the cool thing about WYBC Sports—it’s totally student-run. We had an alumnus helping us out who graduated in ’07 who had done WYBC as well. As he stated, there are about 60 Division 1 college hockey programs. Yale is the only one where the student radio is the primary radio. Every other school has a broadcasting company—the athletics department is paying people to broadcast the games. We’re the only ones where the student-run station is the flagship station.
YH: How much background research does sports broadcasting require?
EF: In a given week for a regular season game, the beginning of the week is setting up who’s going to do the broadcasts and getting the logistics of that worked out. If it’s going to be a road trip: how are they going to get there, how are they going to get back? And then it’s those people’s job to really start looking into it: memorizing rosters if they’re going to be on play-by-play, finding interesting facts if they’re going to be on color, which the athletic departments of these schools do a great job helping you out with. They produce these things called game notes, which give you a lot of that information right there.
For the Frozen Four, obviously, it was once again kind of a special case. [We did] a lot of reading newspaper articles, a lot of that type of thing, pasting it all together in one big document that we were using for research.
YH: Do you know who your listeners are?
EF: It really depends from game to game. We used to be just online-only for the last four years or so, but in late January we went back on to WYBC AM 1340. We were then able to reach a local New Haven audience. Especially with Yale-Quinnipiac in the national championships, there’s a lot of general New Haven interest in that to begin with.
One of our biggest listeners on Saturday was President-elect Salovey, who was commenting in the chat afterwards; we have a little chat box.
YH: Can you tell me a little bit more about your trip to Pittsburgh for the Frozen Four?
EF: We drove down on Wednesday. So we were there Thursday for the semi-final game, which went to overtime, 2-2, against the Massachusetts Lowell Riverhawks. It’s just an incredible experience to be at an NHL-sized arena. Normally, we’re traveling to these college hockey rinks that are maybe capacity for 4,000 or 5,000. [It’s incredible] just to see the environment of 18,000 people, in Pittsburgh, a city that’s really getting into it—everywhere you went in Pittsburgh there were people in hockey jerseys, Frozen Four signs everywhere.
YH: What were your days like while you were there?
EF: Very busy. And I think that’s something a lot of people were surprised by. They think, “Oh, you just got to the game and broadcast, and then it’s over.” But there’s a lot of stuff. Like, on Thursday, the game was at 4:30 p.m. We were there, eating breakfast by 9:00 [a.m.], getting ready, talking about it, and by noon we were already at the arena in Pittsburgh, getting set up, getting interviews with media people. We like to talk to Chip Malafronte, the main hockey writer for the New Haven Register, or Katie Baker, [BK ‘05], a Yale alum who is a writer for Grantland. We had one of our guys go out and talk to people waiting to get in. There’s a lot of quick turnaround, though. We’d send him out to do interviews at 2:00 p.m., he’d come back with the recorder at 3 p.m., and I’d have to get on as the producer and put together the little clips and edit that all together. And then you’re obviously on air. We have a 90-minute pregame so we were on air from 3:00 p.m. to around 8:30 p.m. that day.
And then after that, it’s not over. You go to the post-game press conferences, you record those, you go to the locker room, you interview people in the locker room, then you go back and you take all of those off the recorder, edit those, get highlights for the next day. It was definitely all hockey and all radio from wake-up to bedtime.
YH: So how well do you get to know the players, if at all?
EF: It’s not a deep relationship. I would say it’s more of a working relationship where you know them, they might know you, you probably have name recognition, you might say hi to them as you walk past.
YH: And the coaches?
EF: The coaches you get to know a little bit better because we do a pregame interview with Head Coach Keith Lane before every game. Once again, that’s a little more professional, but you’re spending more time together.
YH: What was it like to see all the Yale fans in Pittsburgh?
EF: It was great to see that attendance. I was worried, definitely, when they first made it to the Frozen Four and [with] the initial packages that Yale athletics offered. [That package] was $200 with no transportation, and I didn’t really think they were particularly accommodating. But they definitely realized that quickly and stepped up. Thursday was a little disappointing, but I think that was understandable. It was short notice, it was a weekday, it was Tap Night—whatever. But Saturday was just awesome. To see all the people show up and have Yale really be the loudest in that arena, I think, gave a really good impression of Yale fans in front of a national audience.
And probably the best moment from Pittsburgh was afterwards. Everybody congregated in the lobby of the Marriott, where everybody was staying, this random gathering that you would never see at any other point: the team, parents, media, alumni, and fans all hanging out in the hotel lobby afterwards. Definitely something that can only happen when a team wins a national championship.
—This interview was condensed by the author