ADELAIDE, Australia – As I progressed through one of the more prolific weeks of my commentating and podcasting life, finishing last week’s World Championships with 52 matches called and eight podcasts recorded in 10 days, there was a recurring version of the same question in the comment sections and in my direct messages: “Do you use a teleprompter or do you have a photographic memory?”
I was both amused and honored at the question.
Amused, because after nearly a decade of podcasting, we still have barely passable audio; for our listeners to think we have mastered the art of a teleprompter, not to mention traveling the world with it, gave us far more credit than we deserve.
As for the photographic memory, if you had witnessed the near-daily looks of exasperation from my wife as I make my triumphant return from the grocery store, only to realize that I have kept my indomitable streak of forgetting multiple items alive, well, you will know there is no photographic memory here.
What I do have, though, is a meticulous process of prepping for matches that might seem unnecessary and tedious to some — and to some degree, maybe it is — but is critical for me.
Interviewing Martins Plavins in Rio/Volleyball World photo
Every match begins with the basics
For each match, there is a cluster of basic information. I split a page of notebook paper in two, one team getting the top half, the other getting the bottom. It’s important to me to have everything I need on one page, without needing to flip back and forth.
I will write each player’s name, age, height, and hometown, and if that information isn’t available, I make a point to find it out.
Below the basic biographical information go the matches they have played in that tournament.
I’ll do this same information even when I call the same team multiple days in a row, as I did for, say, Stefie Fejes and Jasmine Fleming, or Carol Salgado and Rebecca Cavalcanti, whom I called for a combined nine matches in Adelaide alone.
Necessary? Maybe not. But in the repetition of writing these matches and scores down, over and over and over again, it becomes etched deeper into my memory, to the point that the information comes quickly whenever I need it, without requiring notes.
In a pinch, when I had to reference one of their matches while calling a different match, that information came to me like a dog to a treat, unbidden, tail wagging, tongue out, instantly ready. Because of the steady repetition, this information becomes etched enough into my brain that I can recall it months or years later, unbidden and with little effort. This comes in handy during, say, the women’s final, which was a rematch of the Gstaad gold medal match, where I can safely write the scores as 21-19, 21-18 and know with certainty, prior to fact checking, that those were the scores. (*I wrote this on a plane without WiFi and, on later inspection, got the scores right from a match that happened in July).
With the basic information covered, I get into specifics.
Pre-interview with Anders Mol and Christian Sorum after they won Hamburg/Volleyball World photo
The specific information of this particular matchup
Previous head-to-head matchups go in the top-right corner of the page. If there are no previous matchups between those specific teams, I’ll note how each individual player has done against one another in different partnerships. Rarely is this relevant, but I enjoy knowing these types of things, and sometimes it comes in handy.
World Championships experience – or whatever event that’s being played – and finishes, are then jotted down next to each player’s biographical information.
Historical context comes next.
How have they done at this venue or in this country? Is anything significant – Latvia’s first World Championship medal, say, or a career-high finish for a team or country like France’s Teo Rotar and Arnaud Gauthier-Rat, or Carol getting her first World Championships medal in nine times trying, etc. – on the line? How’s their record in gold medal matches, or bronze, whichever they’re playing for? What story does that tell?
I research any potential significance to the results for both teams, write it down, and also pass it along to the content team so we can tie our broadcast in with the storylines being pumped out on social media.
Then I get deep into the BeachData app and cover any relevant statistics.
Hanging with the legend, Laura Ludwig, on the comms with Kyle Friend in Hamburg/Volleyball World photo
A statistical deep dive, and the why behind the numbers
If we’re in the first or early rounds of the tournament, the stats might be either not available, irrelevant in some cases (Carol and Rebecca’s numbers vs. Egypt, for example, were hardly indicative of what they’d have done against a more capable team, and I mostly tossed them out), or too small of a sample size to be of much use. In that case, I look for trends, getting their averages for the season and, more importantly to me, their recent trend of tournaments to the months preceding whatever event I’m calling. With two data sets, now I can identify any differences there may be, good or bad. Sometimes a team is trending up, sometimes down, and seeing any trend, one way or the other, has the potential to be useful. Take, for example, Carol improving her transition kill rate from 46 on the season to 64 in the World Champs.
That’s huge.
But simply spotting that doesn’t do you much good. It’s fun, sure, and a good note for the viewers. If I were to stop there, though, I’d be selling the viewers awfully short.
Because the magic is in the why.
What was Carol doing differently that allowed those numbers to pop? Digging more in system? Moving the ball around? Shooting instead of swinging? Swinging instead of shooting?
Let’s use the men’s gold medal match, Elmer Andersson and Jacob Holting-Nilsson vs. David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig, as another example.
Here I had two relevant data sets: The seven matches of the World Championships that preceded the finals, as well as the three previous clashes between the two teams.
How did the data sets compare?
Unfavorably for Andersson and Holting-Nilsson.
Andersson’s side-out percentage in the World Championships was 72 heading into the finals – yet in their matches against the elder Swedes, it was just 54.
That’s a useful nugget.
Understanding why is even more useful.
Film comes in handy here, and it is a huge benefit to travel as frequently on Tour as I do to see these changes myself. I had watched all of their previous matches, and called both of them in Montreal in August. I knew Andersson struggled scoring on Ahman, because Ahman shifted into Andersson’s sharp angle swings so well. If he were to switch and attack the line, he’d have to go over or around Hellvig. This is no easy feat.
From here, I take it a step further: What, then, could I expect Andersson and Holting-Nilsson to do about it?
As we explained during the pre-match leadup, we expected a heavy dose of Holting-Nilsson options to alleviate the pressure on Andersson.
Now the viewer is primed for what might come, and the first set was a remarkable display of exactly that, as Holting-Nilsson hit 100 percent during the first set, most of them coming on two.
It is for these reasons that having been able to regularly commentate every single team that I called from the round of 16 onward, most of them for several years, is hugely beneficial. If I haven’t been traveling and haven’t seen the team play, which happened in pool play and the early rounds, I’ll flip through a few recent matches on VolleyMetrics to get a feel for their style of play and what makes them tick.
Because this is beach volleyball, sometimes there is not even that, and you do go in a bit blind.
Cruising in Rio with Kyle Friend/Daniel Freitas photo
The enormous benefit of hanging around
Even the lack of film or any potentially useful data is a rectifiable situation, for far more valuable than film and nerding on stats is a simple conversation with the team, be it the players themselves or the coaches.
Most of these conversations and interactions happen naturally, in restaurants and lobbies and cafes and walking to the venue. In journalism school, my professors called it “hanging around” and there may be no more valuable thing in the world than simply hanging around the players on whom you will be commentating. Sometimes you can just go watch a practice, or lounge around the facility, or take an extra long time to eat wherever the athletes eat, so you can say hi and chat and be human with them. You’ll be surprised at how beneficial this is.
On the final day of the World Championships, I played pickup at the venue with Kerri Pottharst’s son, Tyson, and a couple of his buddies in the morning. As I was walking out, I ran into Razzie Johnson and Anders Kristiansson, the architects of the budding Swedish dynasty. Both of their teams were in the finals, and they looked at ease, like men on vacation. I said as much.
“We are on vacation,” Razzie said, and he laughed, and we talked about the extraordinarily improbable odds of his two teams meeting in the finals. Apparently he and Anders had done a few interviews in Sweden prior to the event and told them exactly that: That the odds were literally zero percent of such a thing occurring. The interview was now going viral.
Their biggest problem that Sunday, in fact, was not in coaching at all, but where they were going to sit, seeing as they weren’t going to be in the boxes to coach against their own team. They had been kicked out of the VIP section the day before and wondered if it might happen again.
Of all things, then, the main stressor for Johnson and Kristiansson on what should have been the most intense day of the entire beach volleyball season was where they would sit to watch the match.
What a lovely couple of nuggets that was to bring up on the broadcast.
Through these conversations, through the simple act of hanging around, you’ll get to know the players and coaches and their personalities. You’ll see them cracking jokes in the gym – or not – and get a sense of how they work together. You’ll understand their quirks and superstitions, like how Tina Graudina, the newly-crowned World Champion, ate chicken pesto pasta for four straight days in the playoff rounds because, even though she isn’t incredibly superstitious, she was winning, wasn’t she? She couldn’t just change now.
So she’s maybe a little stitious, and, if I had to guess, will have a favorable relationship of chicken pesto pasta for a very long time.
That small interaction became a fun conversation on the broadcast.
Having hosted a podcast for nearly a decade, and having had many, if not most, of the athletes on once, some multiple times, has been beneficial beyond measure. Being friends with the great majority of them is also extraordinarily valuable, and although this is the source of my greatest criticism – that I am too soft on the players who are struggling, which I am and won’t deny it – it is also the source of my greatest upside, in that the players trust me to tell their story in a way that is fair and, hopefully, a light for the game.
That comes from hanging around, which comes with the extra benefit of being a fun thing to do, because the players make for wonderful company.
Chatting with Thamela and Victoria after the won Ostrava/Volleyball World photo
The sweet sauce of hand-writing everything
It’s possible I buried the lead here, because I think that, above all else, the most vital aspect of this is that all the prep I do, for every match, is hand-written.
Could it be printed? Of course.
It would be easier, and probably wouldn’t make much of a difference in the short-term, so long as I knew where to look and reference the numbers and notes I’d need. But I wouldn’t know the information. It wouldn’t be etched into my brain.
Over the long-term, hand-writing notes, match after match after match, over the course of four years and probably more than 1,000 matches has turned my memory into a fairly reliable bank of information. I am able to dig up and recall seemingly obscure notes and numbers and trends that might not have even been useful when I wrote them but suddenly, years later, without really making an effort to recall them, they’re just there, waiting for me.
I don’t know if there’s science to back that up, but handwriting provides an extra layer of stickiness to the information for me that typing does not.
I also want to be clear: I am under no false pretenses that I am a world-class commentator. If Jim Nantz is the Phil Dalhausser of the industry, I am a mid-level qualifier player, at best. But I now have at least enough points to be in the qualifier, maybe winning a match or two. I’ve identified processes that are showing promise. When I listen to old matches I’ve done, I cringe, not unlike when I watch old film of my playing days.
That’s as reliable a sign of improvement as any.
So whether it’s through stubborn resolve or smarts or whatever you want to call it, I use no teleprompter and rarely reference notes. The information has to be known, deep down, and for that, the process above is the only way I know how to make that happen. Frito knows the rules when we shoot previews and recaps: One take only.
That’s the only take we get on the broadcast.
If we can’t do it in one take, then we don’t know the information as well as we should.
And if we don’t think we can do it in one take, it’s back to prepping.
