Sports personalities have undeniably used social media to great effect. So is TikTok and X fluency the fast track to a solid career in sports radio? Two veteran sportscasters say the industry’s talent pipeline depends on young people hearing the answer is “no.”
The National Alliance of State Broadcasters Associations brought the conversation to its Broadcast Advocate podcast, featuring WEEI Red Sox Radio Network lead play-by-play voice Will Flemming and KSDK-TV Sports Director Frank Cusumano. Missouri Broadcasters Association President Chad Mahoney and Massachusetts Broadcasters Association Executive Director Jordan Walton co-hosted.
Flemming, who walked away from Silicon Valley in 2009 and spent a decade working minor league baseball stops before landing with the Red Sox in 2019, was unsparing on where young broadcasters lose the plot. “I would not think of yourself as an online personality presence,” he said. “If you only think of yourself as how many followers you have on Instagram or TikTok and Twitter, and you’re constantly searching for clicks and follows and all this stuff, I do not think that’s the right way to build a career for yourself. I think it’s a sugar high these days.”
Flemming acknowledged that technology has stripped away gatekeepers and expanded the runway for reps, but said the people with real hiring power are not moved by viral moments. “I think that if you want to have a career that’s sustainable and that is rewarding and that can last 20, 30, 40 years, that kind of job is not going to be earned by being a TikTok sensation. It just isn’t.”
His prescription: master fundamentals before developing a personality, build human connections deliberately, and read books. “I swear to goodness, like if you can just be a more well-rounded human being in the world that we’re in now, that’s something I tell young aspiring broadcasters all the time.”
Cusumano framed an internship as the proving ground that social media cannot replicate. “By the end of this internship, I better know your name,” he said, describing his standard for every intern who comes through the department. “You have got to be the greatest intern of all time because there’s such few jobs in this business. It’s an opening. There’s going to be about 50 tapes, and those tapes are going to be looked at by one person for about 20 seconds.”
On preparation versus instinct, Cusumano recalled the late Jack Buck pulling 12 pages of notes from Kelly Chase’s hands during an early St. Louis Blues broadcast and tossing them from the press box. Buck’s instruction, as Cusumano told it: “You know, the game of hockey, it’s in your head. It’s not in your notes. See it and talk about it.”
Flemming extended the point to what he views as modern broadcasting’s over-reliance on statistics, citing Hall of Fame Red Sox broadcaster Joe Castiglione. “People have enough numbers at their own job. We don’t need to flood them with numbers.” His own conviction on the matter: “I just fundamentally believe that people want to be told stories. They want to relax. They want to take it easy.”
Both closed on the same note, framed differently. Flemming called being good to people the most important career decision he has made. Cusumano, who said a general manager once told his station’s sports director he would never be hired there, reduced it to persistence. “I could fill this whole wall behind me with rejection letters from TV stations in St. Louis. I never took no for an answer. That’s the bottom line for me.”
“By the end of this internship, I better know your name.”
Imagine your career being in this guys hands???