Chalin Cahlik

 Overview:

Women's Volleyball was one of the many sports WTUD regularly broadcasted and as such we followed their season intently.  The women had a fantastic year, putting together their best season to date.  With the returning women for next year, this team will be a forced to be reckoned with.

​

WTUD was able to cover the home games the Women's Volleyball team, several of the games I broadcasted started prior to my official acceptance into the mentorship program, but I did them as extra work to learn more about the craft!  One of the games I learned the most is listed below, but many of the games on the season were great to watch!

​

 General Duties:

Each Volleyball match was set up with a multiple camera shot that Russ and I used to capture the best possible angles for each game.  Duties included getting to each match an hour to hour and a half early to set up production including multiple cameras, mixers and production software.  Setting up can be more difficult for Volleyball than other sports because of the multiple camera angles we use and the usual smaller crew to work with.

​

Once the production equipment has been set up it was my duty to ensure the music streaming was continuous leading up to the event while Russ often worked with the camera.  Once the event begins, my job becomes much more difficult and much more entertaining.  When the event begins my duties become focused solely on play-by-play action as well as controlling commercials during timeouts.  Often times I would be doing the play-by-play alone, but there were times that students would want to learn the aspects of broadcasting and would join me as my color commentators.  When we would have students who would want to run the camera, Russ would join me on the broadcast and we would have a great time.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 Highlight: TU vs Kentucky Wesleyan 

​

TU took on the Kentucky Wesleyan Panthers in a Tuesday nightcap.

This match stuck out to me because of how dominant the Dragons looked and this truly was a great example of a good team making a bad team look bad.  The first four points of the match belonged to the Dragons and broadcasting a game that is fast from the start is incredibly fun.  You are able to really get into the match and get everyone fired up based upon how quickly you can use your style of broadcasting.  TU began to pull away with a 10-3 run and eventually just took the ball home in a 25-12 slaughtering. 

 

The second set of this match was much closer and something that I had to learn to do was become less honest and more telling of what people wanted to hear.  In matches like these TU should dominant every point every set and take each set quickly.  When sets get close you have to try and find positives in events that there truly aren’t and that was something I had to learn.  There will always be times when you have to be honest, but being too brutally honest all the time on a campus sponsored radio station isn’t exactly the best approach.  The Dragons took the second set sloppily 25-18.

 

The third set was back to how things should be, but still a little sloppy.  With freshman Jenna Huffman leading the charge the Dragons were never truly in any danger, but I think even they knew they were playing poorly.  As a broadcaster you want to try and gauge the feeling of the team and the crowd and react accordingly.  If the team is getting beat badly you do not want to seem up beat and peppy because it’s almost insulting, but at the same time you do not want to sound like Eeyore and make people think the game is depressing.   These were all attributes I learned from games like these blowout type wins.  The dragons took the final set 25-13.

 

The match was a 3-0 sweep for the Dragons 25-12, 25-18, 25-13.

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

​