broadcasts with an all-new NCAA Men’s Volleyball Radio “Game of the Week” package (more on that in a moment) and marketing of the WIVA league with on-going PR.
Newcomb instantly said yes to my ideas and turned me loose. I quickly sold several solid sponsors. The first was a league title sponsorship to PowerBar, a Berkley, California based manufacturer of energy food bars. I sold them a one-year corporate sponsorship for $45,000 and they got their logo on all of the Volleyball nets that each team in the WIVA used, title sponsorship of the league tournament plus radio commercial time on the new league radio broadcasts I was setting up. The second WIVA Men’s Volleyball sponsor was Continental Airlines. The carrier gave more than 50, positive space airline tickets good to/from any US destination.
Now that was worth something!
So I took the tickets and sold them for cash to Bob Reese, the father of Carter Reese, who was playing for UC Santa Barbara at the time and then gave additional commercial time to his company, Motorvac, a manufacturer of automotive engine cleaning equipment. So now, I had more than $80,000 in cash from the sale of the airline tickets and three new league sponsors. All of this happened prior to the start of the 1992 Women’s season, so I really had my hands full getting all of the marketing elements ramped up to start for the men’s season that coming January.
Now, let me explain how I created this league radio deal.
1992-93 was a strategic year of growth for the Internet with introduction of Windows 2.1 starting to take off and 386-chip computers were popping up all over the place but it would still be years away before the consumer market would see Pentium processors from Intel. Also coming onto the scene was a new Internet audio company called AudioNet, based in Dallas, Texas that created a new service that is commonplace today; live streaming of music and sports through a home computer. Before AudioNet was dreamed of, sports fans who wanted to listen live to their favorite college sports team had to actually dial number, punch in their credit card and a live operator would then connect them to a radio feed of their specific sports team, generally football. Then you could turn on a speaker and listen to the game from the local radio broadcast.
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In Sunland, California, a suburb of Los Angeles tucked away alongside the Southern California hillsides, is a small, unimpressive strip mall located near the Interstate 210 Freeway. Nestled within these uninspiring shops and grocery stores is a doorway to a downstairs office and the “headquarters” for the Cable Radio Network. Mike Horn was, and still is as of this writing, the founder and president of CRN which provides an eclectic brand of “radio” programming that is available exclusively to Cable TV subscribers. It is relatively obscure to find CRN on any of the cable TV listings, but it is there, and Horn had signed-up a solid list of nationwide Cable TV systems that carry his audio programming. I took a morning off and drove over to Sunland and met Mike at his CRN offices and, with some of the sponsor money in hand, prepaid for an entire season of NCAA Men’s Volleyball programming for the next January. I would create the radio log of commercials that CRN would follow and the music outcues and return from commercial breaks. And since every sports broadcast needs a music “bed” to end each broadcast, I used, “I Love Your Smile” by ‘90’s pop star Shanice which came out in 1991 and had a great beat.
Next was creating a three-step platform the for expansion of the sports broadcasts across America and around the world.
Step One: Have CRN carry the NCAA Men’s Volleyball programming which would give the NCAA Men’s Volleyball sports broadcasts a national, satellite platform. With CRN available throughout most all of North America, via satellite, it offered sports fans a chance to listen from pretty much anywhere.
Step Two: Link sports and news websites around the world to these new broadcasts. In 1992, this had never been done before and each of the more than 500 webmasters that I e-mailed jumped at this new opportunity and before you knew it, there were hundreds of web links found on websites across America and around the world that has the logo of CRN (and the embedded link to the station) and the schedule of the Volleyball broadcasts on their respective webpages.
Step Three: Build a commercial network of sports radio stations that would also take the CRN feed in total. Thinking really “out of the box”, the first radio station I contracted with was 660 AM, KTNN, located on the Navajo Indian nation’s reservation at Window Rock, Arizona in far eastern Arizona. Basically in the middle of nowhere. Now, why would I buy time on a Native American radio station that was the “Voice of the Navajo Nation”? Well, Dear Reader, radio stations that are low on the AM dial generally will generally have a better reception and, more important, the Native Americans were the sole owners of a FCC “grandfathered” 50,000 watt radio powerhouse. This means that during evening hours, when all of the NCAA Men’s Volleyball broadcasts would be aired, 660 on the AM dial would provide a gigantic “footprint” that would “throw” the broadcasts into 11 Western US states and even to Central Canada to the north. That means commercial radio coverage to all of California, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Oregon and Idaho. This was huge. The station’s broadcast power was a “radio flamethrower” that would send the sports broadcasts to every major US metropolis east of Denver.
When you want something done in radio (specifically), and in business (in general) I went right to the decision maker at the top. In this case, I went directly to the station manager and sold him the idea of carrying the season package with a multi-year renewal clause. No, I never traveled to Window Rock but convinced the GM anyway.
Money is the great equalizer.
Then, just like with Mike Horn and CRN, I paid KTNN for the entire broadcast season in advance. Now I had the base foundation with CRN sending out the broadcast via satellite and KTNN carrying the sportscasts on its station. I then flew to Las Vegas (that I could do) and met with the station manager of KVEG AM Radio, an all-sports radio station and following the same pattern, signed this 50,000-watt station to the same NCAA Volleyball sports radio package. When the broadcasts started in January 1993, it was a mega hit. I even had the Los Angeles Times Sports Section running listings of each of the broadcast in its daily Radio/TV log.
NCAA Volleyball radio broadcasts were being listed right next to those for the Los Angeles Lakers!
This meant that NCAA Volleyball had finally arrived. Fans were dialing in, not only to CRN but listening in from around the world. Don’t forget that I was still producing and broadcasting the Hawaii radio broadcasts and as many of the BYU broadcasts that I could fit in to this new league broadcast package. Suffice to say, I was maxed out. By the time the 1993/94 broadcast seasons rolled around, I had to opt out of the BYU Volleyball programming. Bob understood the pressure I was under. The BYU women’s season was insane enough with the home and away broadcasts but adding the overlay of the Wahine broadcasts; but when it came to the Men’s season, I just couldn’t handle anymore.
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Here’s the thing, I was now the definitive “voice” of Volleyball in America and, in all respect to Bob, had gone far beyond the broadcasts he was doing for KSRR. Not to acknowledge Bob’s help in putting me on this path would be entirely inappropriate .
Thank you Bob.
But now I was on my own and everything was clicking.
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Let me introduce you to one of my very best friends that Volleyball brought me to. His name is Mitch Lehman and I was acquainted with him through a mutual friend at Sideout Sport, a Southern California manufacturer of Volleyball sportswear. Mitch was doing some consulting for Sideout and I met him at the Monrovia factory one afternoon. We hit it off immediately and I asked him if he wanted to sit
