Aspiring sportscasters find their calling

In the world of sports, incredible highlights can be found on a daily basis.

But when these moments combine with a great sports call, they can transcend the field.

Calls such as Joe Starkey frantically shouting, “The band is out on the field! He’s going to go into the end zone!” during the 1982 matchup between Cal and Stanford made a crazy ending even more memorable.

Now — thanks in collaboration with Rollins College Athletics — students in Full Sail’s Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting have the chance to learn what it takes to make those big (and small) calls from the booth.

“It’s an awesome opportunity for them, because the one thing that Full Sail doesn’t have is athletics,” said program director and Rollins alum Gus Ramsey. “When I was at Rollins, I went to the radio station and signed up, and I broadcast all the games. It was just a great opportunity just to get the reps and to be in a live broadcast situation.”

From volleyball to baseball to lacrosse, the students in the Full Sail program will lend their voices to calling 150 Rollins’ home games. The collaboration will give students the chance to get real experience, and the Rollins athletic department will get help calling games.

It’s the perfect set up for students such as Taylor Schaub, who are looking to become career sportscasters. Although unlike many, Schaub’s love for journalism started pretty early.

“My dad is a reporter for a local CBS affiliate in San Francisco, and my mom was producer for ABC, so I kind of grew up in this whole journalism scene,” Schaub said. “I can remember being 4 years old and going in the news van when he was going to go cover a story. I was completely immersed in all of it as a kid.” 

Growing up just outside of a sports loving city such as San Francisco helped fuel his love for the field of sports journalism, and Schaub decided to make a tremendous leap around nine months ago.

After taking a tour of campus and talking to Ramsey about the program, Schaub was hooked.

In the last several months, Schaub and his classmates have begun to learn the intricacies of the trade. They have taken classes on how to handle being in front of a camera and attended talks from some of ESPN’s biggest names — Sage Steel, Jay Harris, Jeremy Schapp — on how to make it in sportscasting.

Although the classes are helpful for students, fewer things beat real-world experience. This is where calling games at Rollins comes in.

“At first I’m thinking, ‘This is amazing, we have an added layer to an already great program,’” Schaub said. “But then you start to think about it and you start to go through some of these play-by-play seminars that we have, and you go, ‘Oh my God, this is more work than I could have ever imagined.’ This is preparation on top of preparation.”

Leading up to his first call — Rollins volleyball’s first home match of the season — Schaub spent hours going over what he had learned while also learning as much as he could about the team and the game of volleyball itself. Up until that day, his understanding of the sport was limited, he said.

Although not being familiar with a sports team may be a challenge in and of itself, it also can be a tremendous help to push students to be better, Ramsey said.

“The advantage I had is I went to the school — I knew the coaches and I knew the players, so I could go on the air and talk knowledgeably about them because I was in class with some of them and hung out with some of them,” Ramsey said. “My students don’t have that luxury, but in some ways that’s better, because they now have to do more research and prepare harder.”

As he continues through the program, Schaub and the others at Full Sail still have more work to do.

“I want to tell stories,” Schaub said. “I want to go out there wherever I get a job — whether that’s doing play-by-play or hosting a radio show. And I want to tell stories, because that’s the thing that gets hammered over and over again in this program — that we are storytellers. Even when we are calling games: You’re telling a story of the game. And that’s been what’s so cool about this program — that I’ve gotten to tell so many stories already.”