LHS Sportscasting Crew Changing the Way We Watch Lowell Sports
This is a special free article from the Lowell Ledger. Most of our articles are published direct in the newspaper, but we share some favorites for free on the website for you to share and enjoy. Note, Lowell Radio is a partner with the Lowell Ledger Podcast program. This will be featured in 2/7 version of the Ledger, along with more information on the program.
Kyle Stauffer, Eli Wilcox, and Tray Coulier Joining the Ledger Podcast on January 31st.
It’s a Tuesday night basketball game. The Lowell Boys Varsity basketball squad is playing top-ranked Grand Rapids Christian at home. The stands are pretty sparse, it’s a Tuesday night after all. There are though, plenty of students at the game not in the student section, but with passes, cameras, and broadcasting the event.
Yes, while the game is being played, the LHS Sportscasting Crew, is hard at work. Tray, Kyle, and Eli Wilcox, Director of the Sportscasting Crew joined the Lowell Ledger podcast this past week to discuss their involvement with this up and coming club.
In the podcast, which lasts about 23 minutes, we discussed with the trio their favorite parts of being in the program, the time that is involved, some of their favorite broadcasts, their roles, among many other topics.
There are several elements to what the team does. There’s the actual sports broadcasters. Student radio broadcasting for sports isn’t new. Mallory Kooi, Roman Rozell, and Toby Robinson have been among past student sports casters joined by current students Connor Rapson, and the duo of Tray Coulier and Kyle Stauffer (featured above). An example of that is Coulier’s call of Ben Gaskin’s buzzerbeater winner earlier this basketball season.
“That was a fun one. For sportscasting, you want to keep the audience interested. If the sportscaster is getting excited, I feel like that’ll get the audience excited,” Coulier said.
So we have sound. That’s what WRWW has done well, for a long time. WRWW has been broadcasting audio of LHS sporting events over the waves even prior to having student broadcasters.
Next we layer on video. Since the pandemic and the emergence of live-broadcasted high school sporting events, video has been brought in. The NFHS provided Lowell and schools around the country with pixellot cameras, computers, and the technology to broadcast through the NFHS Network. The pay to view service that allows high school sports to be watched from anywhere, with the caveat that the host schools operate the camera. WRWW was able to overlay their sportscasters with the NFHS feed to enhance the experience.
Below - WRWW Archived Lowell Girls Basketball Broadcast fit with cameras, sports broadcasters, and custom a score graphic.
The last add on, we enhance the broadcast. New camera angles, a graphic so we can follow the scores. Have you ever tried to watch a sporting event without knowing the score? Yeah it’s kind of important.
“So the graphics that we put on to the video feed is through a software program that Al (Eckman) found. It’s not as complicated as it looks, but it’s basically just like a regular scoreboard. We have it in a little box in the bottom right corner that we line up and run through the switcher,” Wilcox said. “For basketball, when they do the free throw, like what I'll have is like one camera go up close on like the free throw shooter, and then the other one wide on like the whole shot. Right they're about to like hit the ball up to the hoop, I switch it up. I just think it's such like a good camera shot and such a good like angle for it,” Wilcox added in the podcast.
So with these three, an audio broadcast, video broadcast, and graphics, you get the full high school sports experience right in your living room through lowellradio.org.
One of Stauffer’s favorite games to broadcast was the Byron Center football game, where Lowell knocked off the Bulldogs. “Like we have like we call it like a sky like squib kick pretty much. It forces like their up men to try and take the ball rather than like their deep big guy returner. To watch like our guys get right down the field and end up recovering that like kick was cool, because it was them off kick that really led to eventually us winning,” Stauffer added.
This new initiative does mean that NFHS Network feeds no longer have the layered graphics and audio provided by WRWW, but it does mean the new enhanced feed is available to a larger audience at no cost. For more on this story, read next week’s Lowell Ledger where we’ll dive even more in depth.
“Our sportscasters for football have been Kyle Stauffer, Tray Coulier, and Connor Rapson. Basketball sportscasters are Connor Rapson & Tray Coulier. Baseball sportscasters are Tray Coulier, Kyle Stauffer, and Harmon Esch. Our camera operators are: AJ Anaya, Micah McDonald, Rex Moore, Rowen Creasy, and Sam Washburn. Eli Wilcox is our Sports Broadcasting Director with Micah McDonald as his Assistant Director. The Technical Directors/Laptop Graphics operators are Evan Langenbach and Rowen Creasy.,” sportscasting crew director Al Eckman told the Ledger of his full group.
if sports fans absolutely cannot attend the home varsity basketball, baseball, or football games, in person, they can watch and listen to them from the WRWW website: lowellradio.org
