The play’s the thing

If you've ever watched or listened to a sporting event broadcast, you know who they are: They’re the voices you hear describing the action, naming players and statistics, reminding us about injuries and scoring records.

They are the play-by-play announcers, and to do their jobs successfully, they rely on everything from their extensive training and practice to profession-specific resources like color-coded spot carts, weekly calls with coaches, player interviews, and something called “nuggets.” And they rely on each other.

Jake Hromada (BSJ '18, MS '20) has been building his play-by-play career since he was an eighth grader in Cleveland, listening to the city’s “three-headed play-by-play monster” of Tom Hamilton, Joe Tate and Jim Donovan, who called games for the Guardians, Cavs and Browns.

Hromada is at Ole Miss now, working as a manager of broadcast/digital content and doing play-by-play for their volleyball team and others, but he cut his teeth at OHIO as an undergrad and grad student, calling games for several teams and building a network he credits with helping him land this “pretty freaking cool” job.

He says an effective play-by-play should serve to make a good thing better for listeners and viewers.

“You get fans that pour so much time and effort and money into [players and teams],” he says. “When you can enhance that moment and create memories for fans, whether it be positive or negative, I think you've done your job.”

Doing that job takes research, tools and support.

“You can't just show up to a game,” Hromada cautions. “You have to do homework, so as somebody who hated homework growing up, this this is something I had to accept.”

He allows that this homework is the fun kind, at least for a self-described “nerd” like him. It starts with game notes compiled by sports information directors, or SIDs.

“It's basically all the information you need to know about the team in this little packet of information,” he says. “It has what we call nuggets on the front page.”

Nuggets are the aptly named pieces of trivia or statistics that help an announcer do that crucial work of enhancing the audience experience. It might be that a player is about to break a record for all-time blocks or that they’re on a scoring streak.

“That stuff's really fun, when you're able to find something about an athlete that they don't know about themselves or they don't realize,” he says. “It's pretty cool to see their reaction when they're like, oh wow, I didn't think about it that way.”

Once he’s read through the game notes, Hromada starts to assemble his spot chart, a multi-page document that resembles the crib sheet you might have created for the biggest final of your life.

“It's just basically one big open exam, or open note test,” he says about each game.

Hromada organizes his spot chart by player, color-codes it, and takes longhand notes on top of the typed-out content.

“This is a rendition of years and years and years of what works for me and what hasn't worked for me, and I'm still making adjustments.”

He says most aspiring announcers start out by asking a more established play caller for “their charts” and adjust from there, learning from experience. For Hromada, mentorship from more seasoned play callers was an essential element in his own development.

“You want to find somebody that actually cares about your professional success and your growth.”

He has found quite a few of those people among his connections at OHIO.

He credits fellow Bobcats Seth Austin (BSJ '14) and Ryan Cochran (BSC '14) with helping him land his current job. He and Cochran have been friends since freshman year, and Austin held the Ole Miss job when Hromada was an undergrad. Hromada recalls a phone call the two had his sophomore year.

“I remember hanging up that phone call and saying to myself, 'Man, I'd love to have that job someday.'”

He occasionally reaches out to Brian Boesch (BSJ HTC ’12), Tony Castricone (BSJ ’05), and the voice of OHIO Football Marty Bannister, to ask for feedback on short clips from games. And of course, these are professional storytellers: sometimes the best way to learn is to hear them tell their tales.

“They just have stories,” Hromada says. “And sometimes it's just saying, ‘hey, there was a situation the other day and I don't think I called it that great.’ And you just kind of talk it over.”

He calls Bannister a “godsend,” and doesn’t want to “sound too cheesy,” but says their relationship has felt akin to Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. Certainly, sports broadcasts sometimes contain insight that could only come from the Force. 

It wasn’t specifically related to play-calling when the actor Timothée Chalamet was the only panelist on ESPN's College GameDay to predict a Bobcat victory over Miami in the 2024 MAC Championship game, but it certainly showed a kind of Jedi wisdom.  

We asked Hromada for his opinion: how many mentions of that now-iconic Bobcat moment would be too many if he were calling the championship game? 

First, he says he would mention it in the pregame, “just because our audience loves GameDay and people want to know who they're picking to win.”

“As the game script unfolds and it becomes a blowout, I definitely would talk about it more,” he continues. “In blowouts, your broadcast can go off the rails. At that point, you're just trying to keep your audience entertained because the outcome seems to already be decided.”

Whether it’s Timothée Chalamet predicting victory for your team or Taylor Swift attending the game, Hromada reiterates that a good play caller knows that it's about the complete picture.

“The viewer wants to watch the game, but they also want a feel for the environment,” he says.

Finally, he says, the audience needs to know a very important thing.

“You want them to know that you can tell a story.”