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WHITE PLAINS HIGH’S MIKE COUZENS, CLASS OF 2007, VOICE OF THE FORT WAYNE TINCAPS–IN SWANK TAN SUIT AT THE BROADCAST MIKE WITH HIS PLAY-BY-PLAY PARTNER, KENT HORMANN
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WPCNR VIEW FROM THE BROADCAST BOOTH. Interview with Mike Couzens, Voice of the Fort Wayne TinCaps. July 16, 2013:
The major league parks across America are dark tonight.
It’s the All-Star Break, but not at Parkview Field in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Mike Couzens, White Plains High School Class of 2007, Syracuse University Class of 2010 will be telecasting the Fort Wayne TinCaps
Mike Couzens , just turned 24 July 8, is Media Relations Director and TV/ Radio play-by-play man for the Fort Wayne TinCaps. He is in his second year with the Class A Midwest League team, ( San Diego Padres affiliate) broadcasting the action on television in Fort Wayne and on radio back to Fort Wayne, when the team is on the road. You can see him handling the television duties at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2njaJs6Eh8s
Mike, right with his partner Evan Lepler, his analyst for the Ultimate Frisbee telecast recently on ESPN.
In his short sportscasting career he has impressed and attracted the attention of ESPN and works basketball free lance for the ESPN network, and whatever sport they have for him, including Ultimate Frisbee!
Mike, a former basketball player with the White Plains Tigers, credits White Plains high basketball coach Spencer Mayfield for the work ethic that he practices today and Syracuse University for his entry into the glamor of the sportscasting business.
We caught up with Mike last month when he was in White Plains on a break in his schedule and listened to his authoritative, crisp delivery on a series of questions about how do you get a job like that.
Mike graduating WPHS in 2007, knew he wanted to be in play-by-play and applied only to Syracuse University. For him, he told me it seemed to be the best choice. I asked how Syracuse made a difference:
Mike: “I think through a combination of A.) Teaching you how to be a good journalist, meaning how to ask questions properly, how to find information properly, where to find it, who the right people are. If you’re in news , it’s the Public Information Director, in sports, the Sports Information Director. There’s not a lot of sports education that goes on there in this school.
It’s the opportunity that’s provided to you there and how much you take advantage of those opportunities. While I was in school, we had two radio stations, a full-time tv station, not to mention outside internship opportunities. We got to do talk shows, sports updates, play-by-play of basketball, lacrosse, hockey and football.
I was the General Manager of our student station for a year, managing a $75,000 budget and a 100-person staff. When you get out there in the real world, you’ve been there and done that before. It’s not a huge leap for you.”
WPCNR: Were you able to jump directly into professional broadcasting from this?
Mike: “Yes. I graduated in December of 2010. But, in the summer of 2010, before I even graduated, I worked as the assistant broadcaster for the Syracuse Chiefs, the Washington Nationals Triple A team in Syracuse. It was a lot of really good experience. It was the year Steven Strasburg (Nationals’s phenom pitcher), came through.
It wasn’t just play-by-play, it was also media relations. I did about 120 games that year and after I graduated, I went to work in Dayton, Ohio through a connection. Matt Park, the voice of Syracuse University used to work as a broadcaster in the southern League and was good friends with the broadcaster of the Dayton Dragons. I went out there for a year. That was my first play-by-play job after graduating, as the number two broadcaster for the Dragons in the Midwest League.”
WPCNR: How do prepare for a game every day, keeping that mental toughness to do that?
Mike: I arrive at the park on game day at 11 in the morning and do not leave until 11 at night. Every day in baseball is different. Some days might be heavier with media relations requests. Hey, this tv station wants to do a feature. We do a monthly magazine show, so I might have to shoot an interview with a couple of people. I am the Media Relations Department as well for the team, so we put together the game notes. I have an intern who works under me and I critique his play-by-play from the day before. Those are the big parts that eat up your day.
Into the early afternoon I start to think about the game that night.
Baseball is not so much like a basketball game where you have this big event and you have all these notes and notes and notes that you’ve prepared just for that two hour stretch. Baseball, you know we play 140 games in 152 days and a lot of it involves just catching up with the coaching staff and the players from the day before, pulling out that interesting nugget you think might tell a good part of the story, not so much going and looking in, finding an obscure stat, though you like to do that, too.
I find it (play-by-play) is much more about story-telling. I think is the interesting part of what’s going on. We had a new player a couple of weeks ago who was on Family Feud , stuff like that. During the offseason our shortstop lost twenty pounds by radically changing his diet and playing hockey five times a week. It’s interesting stuff like that to draw out what can at times, be a slow game.
WPCNR: How do you earn the respect and accessibility of the players?
MIKE: At this level of baseball, I’m 24 and these guys are about two to three years younger than me or my same age. I relate with them well in that sense. But that’s not all of it. You can’t just rely on your age, you have to show them through the questions you ask, and your broadcasting. Because they’re watching. They’re in the clubhouse watching. We do all our home games on television and they watch those in the clubhouse on FOX television.
You have to demonstrate through your knowledge you’re someone that you earn their respect. I think it’s the same as any other relationship you get along well . At this level of baseball, I relate well to the players because of my age.
On the other hand, in the winter I did basketball for ESPN, and I’m talking to managers who in managerhood analogy has played 16 years in the major leagues. These are guys who forget more baseball than I’ll ever know in my life. You really try and learn from them because they know more about baseball than you. That’s one of the great things about working in baseball, I can learn something new every single day. That’s how I approach it. And that’s it.
WPCNR: How did you come to ESPN?
MIKE: It was really through a break. It was a gentleman named Bill Roth, who graduated from Syracuse in 1987, and ever since except for one year when he graduated and worked play-by-play for Marshall University, has been the play-by-play man for the Virginia Tech Hogies, football and basketball. What I do as a process of trying to help myself get better, I send out stretches of my play-by-play to other people whose work I respect and would like to emulate, and ask them to critique it.
I sent some of my television tape to Bill and he said hey would you mind if passed this along to a friend of mine, a gentleman by the name of Bart Fox who is a producer at ESPN, who asked me if I minded if I passed my tape along to some other people at ESPN. They said we’ll keep your name in mind. That was in July of last year. I said, that’s good, at least they saw it. Nothing came of it immediately, but it’s good to get it in front of the right people,
S0, November rolls around and all of a sudden an e-mail pops up in my mailbox and says, “Hey, can you do these three basketball games at the University of Wisconsin?” I said ABSOLUTELY! So I went out to Madison and did a bunch of games, they were preseason games, Wisconsin versus Cornell, vs. Presbyterian, and those three games turned into 20 games over the course of the winter. I get paid per game.
You can hear Mike’s ESPN basketball sound at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0PktD-0is
Mike says he is a full-time employee of the Tincaps, and is now a full-time resident of Fort Wayne.
WPCNR: How do you like the road?
MIKE: I really like going on the road. For me getting into sports, obviously you have to really like sports to work in sports . But, one of my favorite things is people,meeting new people and travel.
Just last week we were in Grand Rapids Michigan. I interviewed the groundskeeper at the field because they were doing a diamond , a club and a spade card design on the outfield in a promotion game with the fans during the game if the ball was hit there.
I write a blog every day http://tincaps.mlblogs.com ,and I try to interview other people when I go on the road. , the Lansing Lugnuts has one of the three lady public address announcers in all of baseball major league or minor league. To bring a unique perspective like that…keep the story fresh rather than say “Jim Jones went 3 for 4 with a strikeout last night that’s the big story today,” because really it’s not.
Life and sports are all about people and their stories.
That’s the fun part for me. And then we get to go places. People are paying me to travel to these far-off places. We go as far west as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as far east as Cleveland, south to Bowling Green, Kentucky, north to Appleton, Wisconsin— these are places being from White Plains I never would have traveled had I not gotten a job like this. I’ve been to all these places at 23 that some people might never get to see.
WPCNR: What was your biggest thrill in play-by-play so far?
MIKE: I’ll give you two. Last year my team got to go to the championship series in my first year there and two was after my team clinched the play off series in the first half of the season and I went down to the locker room after we were clinched and at home we were on television, in jacket and tie and everything and I had cut my finger in the press box and I went to the trainer’s room to get a band-aid, and the strength and conditioning coach just pulled me out into the clubhouse and they just doused me with beer and champagne.
I got a little bit of a dry cleaning bill that day. It was a lot of fun. You can really do play-by-play for a long time and never experience anything like that.
WPCNR: Where do you go from here?
MIKE: I’m doing some AAU basketball events for ESPN. They are going to fly me out to California, Orlando, Brooklyn and Indianapolis to do one. So hopefully it leads to more basketball in the future. Ideally, I’d like to get a job like Dan Schulman’s, where you get to do Sunday Night Baseball, major league baseball, college basketball during the winter. That would be really cool. Those are sports I’ve always loved growing up. That’s my ultimate dream.
WPCNR: Is there any message you have for the people back here in your hometown, White Plains, New York, USA?
MIKE: I was just home in White Plains, and had everybody over and realized White Plains was a great place to grow up because White Plains is such a great representation of the world we live in. When I graduated, I think racial breakdown of White Plains High School was probably somewhere along a third black, a third Hispanic, and a third white. You get so many different cultures living in White Plains. You can walk three blocks in White Plains down Mamaroneck Avenue and you can see eight different types of restaurants representing eight different cultures from across the world.
I’m thankful for being brought up in White Plains because it equipped me to go anywhere.
Looking back I give a lot of thanks to Spencer Mayfield for doing the basketball team, instilling in me effective hard work playing on the basketball team. You know I was playing with guys like Sean Kilpatrick, (University of Cincinnati )who’s one of the best players in the country right now. Those were the guys I was competing against every day and it installed a good work ethic in me no matter who you are, who you are competing against, you always need to be the best you can be, because you never know what opportunity might be coming for you. When I say playing for that team, I scored 13 points in two years on the varsity team, but it lead me to being a manager for the Syracuse basketball team which opened a lot of doors for me. I just think growing up in White Plains was a fantastic opportunity and I’m thankful for everybody I crossed paths with and helped me get where I am now.
You can hear Mike, who has the authority and personality of Gary Cohen, the informality of Frank Messer, the ruggedness of Ralph Kiner, the humanity of Phil Rizzutto, but he is none of those. He’s Mike Couzens.
When you hear him handling a New York team some day soon, you’ll hear the difference.
You can hear Mike at the Mike with all the TinCaps action next week at www.TheFanFortWayne.com
Wednesday, the 24th,Thursday the 25th, Friday and Saturday the 26 amd 27th at 7 P.M. Pregame at 6:45 P.M. On Sunday, you can tune in the TinCaps from Dayton, Ohio at 7 P.M. and Monday at 7.