Chalin Cahlik

Tiffin University Men’s Basketball had a rollercoaster of a year.  As the season approached there was high hopes for the team as senior Khaleal McCormick was to take over the reins and come back from a season cut short by injury.   With many new faces on the floor and a few returners that seemed to be in fantastic shape, the sky was the limit for TU.

I was extremely excited for the start of basketball season and was ready to assume a more hands on role doing broadcasting for the basketball games.  In years past I was responsible for stating both games and didn’t have many opportunities (aside from road games) to get on the microphone and broadcast.  This year I was given the chance to do broadcast the men’s games with Russ and was able to do some play-by-play and some color commentary. 

 

The best part about broadcasting a sport you know so well is the ability to use terminology that is relevant to the situation and can show the audience how much you truly know about the sport.  The other aspect that makes it enjoyable was how fast past and easily excitable it is, especially the Dragons.  This year was certainly more explosive than years past with high flying Austin Adams dunking every, it allowed for us, as a broadcast crew, to really get into the games.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General Duties:

My duties for Men’s Basketball was to broadcast the games alongside Russ as well as do multiple other activities during the broadcast.  This was by far my most work intensive sport because of all the responsibilities we have for each game and sometimes the student volunteers wouldn’t be available.  The responsibilities included running the game camera, running the mixer, running the advertising and audio laptop and running the scoreboard.  All of these are important and between Russ and I the jobs can get quite hectic.  The game camera was definitely tricky to get used to as it is a very touchy joystick that controls a camera on a swivel.  The advertising software was also tough to learn because of all the different buttons and advertisements, whatever you click the listeners will hear so ensuring the duration of each ad is correctly placed can be tough to learn.

 

Highlight: TU vs Michigan Tech

While this wasn’t the biggest win on the season, the Dragons pushed over the .500 mark late in the season with this victory and that propelled them moving forward.  TU did have a big win over top ranked Saginaw Valley State earlier in the year that could definitely be the game of the year, but Saginaw began to fall late in the season meaning their ranking might not have been as true.

TU started off strong as they often do, but began to fall behind with a 18-17 deficient.  The Dragons went on a run of their own to take a 2 point lead heading into half time. 

This point in the game I began to talk about my early season prediction that Austin Adams would be the stud TU needed this year and boy was I right.  Adams was all over the place pulling down rebounds and putting up big second chance points for the Dragons.  Adams finished with 25 points and 15 rebounds as the Dragons dispatched the Huskies 71-64 to pull above .500 on the year.

 

Time Spent:

This is difficult to assess for basketball because of how much extra work goes into these broadcasts.  Setting up and tearing down can easily take an extra 45 minutes each way and my duties between the two teams, men’s and women’s are vastly different.  The time did fly by when the teams played well as basketball is my favorite sport to watch and TU was certainly a fun team this season.