Going live with the UMKC’s first student-run Internet radio station
University of Missouri-Kansas City center Ashli Hill’s elbow smashes the face of an opposing player. The crowd at the Swinney Recreation Center gasps as a bloodied Eastern Michigan University guard crumples on the hardwood during a late-December women’s basketball game.
The silence on this Saturday afternoon is shattered by a boisterous voice from courtside.
“That’s like taking a 9-iron to the snot factory!” Sterling Brown shouts into his microphone.
Brown, 33, is the play-by-play voice of UMKC hoops on K-ROO, the university’s first student-run station in four decades. K-ROO went live November 3, 2012, the same day as the first women’s basketball game of the season.
More fans in the stands of Swinney Rec overheard Sterling’s colorful call than did those listening online.
Before the game, Brown meets color-commentator Cody Tapp and producer Ryan Witkowski at Mike’s Tavern for rounds of Mexican beer, and they joke about how few people listen to their live streams.
“We get eight or nine listeners,” says 30-year-old Witkowski, “and two of them are our wives.”
Brown corrects him. Listenership is declining: His wife has stopped tuning in.
All three men are nontraditional students, in their late 20s and early 30s. They see K-ROO as their best chance to launch careers in sports radio.
Tapp, a 28-year-old waiter, is trim and wears Buddy Holly glasses. He never struggles to add pouches of analytical insight during Brown’s brief pauses from alliterative flourishes.
Witkowski looks the part of a sports-radio producer: husky, with a scruffy beard, always wearing a baseball cap. He works as a part-time producer for 610 Sports. As a child, he recorded himself analyzing the Royals, which he says is his dream job.
“I’d do my own Royals report,” he says, “and I’d give the tapes to my mom and make her listen on her ride to work.”
Brown, a hulking man who played on the defensive line for Truman State University from 1998 to 2001, started “calling games” in high school while playing football at Rockhurst. When he wasn’t on the field, he’d pretend to be an announcer. It carried over to college and even while playing Madden video games with his friend. He also admits to using a voice recorder to do mock play-by-play at Chiefs games. That has drawn more than a few strange looks from fellow bleacher bums. He’s not afraid to explain.
“My ambition is to be the voice of the Chiefs,” he says. “Or any other major franchise.”
Even though UMKC hasn’t had a student-run radio station (terrestrial or online) for a little more than 40 years, the university has a history of student radio. KCUR 89.3 started as a low-power station in October 1957 and became a charter member of NPR in 1971. By 1984, UMKC students were no longer trained on-air at KCUR.
Students, including KCUR arts reporter Laura Spencer, first pushed the idea of an Internet radio station in 1999. But the station was denied funding. The latest attempt at student radio started four years ago.
Starting a project like K-ROO has been a grinding labor of love for the station’s main proponents. The student volunteers have spent dozens of hours a week working for an Internet station with few listeners. That’s on top of their course loads and day jobs.
Getting K-ROO on the air was a hassle of university bureaucracy and funding problems, and a recruiting nightmare.
“It was brutal,” Witkowski says.
In 2009, a group of students presented a plan for a student-run Internet radio station to the Student Government Association, which granted them $17,000 and a studio space.
“We were stoked,” says Casey Osburn, K-ROO’s longest-tenured aspirant and the station’s music director.
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However, K-ROO failed to launch. Witkowski says the station was hampered by bad timing. The students who were trying to start K-ROO graduated just as the money rolled in. The students who were left weren’t natural leaders, he says.
“You had a ton of interest and drive with no money,” Witkowski says, “and then you get money, and you have no interest and drive.”
The university wasn’t impressed and reclaimed the studio space. Student involvement decreased.
“I had to take a semester off of school,” Osburn says, “because this was so stressful for me.”
Osburn was about to spend the summer running merchandise for the Beautiful Bodies on a tour of the East Coast and Canada when she heard from K-ROO’s faculty adviser.
“I got a phone call the day before I left to fly to Canada for a tour, and I was gone for a little over a month,” she says. “I was like, I don’t even know if I’m going back to school. Is anything happening [with K-ROO]?”
Something was happening.
In the summer of 2011, Witkowski decided to fill the void in station management. He bought equipment and invited people he trusted to join the station.
“It’s just a matter of finding students motivated enough to make something out of nothing,” he says.
Witkowski called Tapp, whom he had met at Penn Valley Community College a couple of years before, and asked him if he wanted to be K-ROO’s sports director. Tapp was in.
Witkowski then called Osburn, whom he remembered from previous station meetings, and asked her if she wanted to be the station’s music director. Osburn jumped onboard.
Brown had met Witkowski in a class a couple of semesters before, and the two discussed their dreams of working in sports radio. Tapp invited Brown to broadcast basketball games with them.
“The rest, as they say, is history,” Witkowski says.
K-ROO is still looking for a news director, someone who will work hard for minimal payoff.
“We’ve got a campus of 12,000 students,” Witkowski says, “and I’ve only found two that have that drive and motivation and desire.”
With a core staff in place, K-ROO’s students faced their first significant decision: Should K-ROO broadcast on KCUR’s HD radio feed or stream online? They chose to stream.
“The reason FM radio took 20 years to take off was the fact that everybody’s car had AM radio,” he says “Nobody had the [FM] stereo. Nobody has HD radio.”
Once K-ROO was set to stream, Tapp asked the athletics department for permission to broadcast women’s basketball games.
The athletics department agreed, giving K-ROO a goal: Go live by November 3, 2012.
“I really thought the game was that big push,” Tapp says. “Finally, we had a deadline.”
The green sportscasters finish their pregame beers at Mike’s and drive to Swinney Rec. Some aspects of sports journalism still amuse them.
“They feed us lunch,” Tapp says. “It really surprised us.”
The three men set up their broadcast table opposite the official scorer’s table and team benches, and far away from the Roos’ official broadcast partner, KCWJ 1030. Three laptops, a stat box computer borrowed from the athletics department, a small sound-mixing board, and three microphones take only a few minutes to prep.
Lunch is catering from Jimmy John’s, and the crew eats with a handful of media members — mostly tall, athletic women a decade or so past college age — in a small room away from the court. Then it’s time for a brief pregame show and the play-by-play.
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Brown, who graduated the day before the game, commandeers the broadcast, howling bombastic descriptions of the on-court action.
“Blocked with two hands!” he says of a swatted shot. “She played volleyball with that one.”
“The bank’s not open that late on a Saturday,” he yells when a shot ricochets off the glass.
Witkowski studies the stats and ensures that the equipment is running properly during the play-by-play.
The game is knotted at 28 at the half. Witkowski hops on the mic while Brown, who seems to know everyone, glad-hands and schmoozes with fans.
This late-December game is only the sixth college hoops contest that the K-ROO team has covered. The three speak clearly and rarely talk over one another, making their sportscasts polished and professional.
During the halftime show, the three-man crew chats about the Roos being in foul trouble and about head coach Marsha Frese’s demeanor.
“She’s not going to accept boneheaded play,” Witkowski assures his listeners.
“No, she’s very no-nonsense,” Tapp agrees.
Witkowski also gives an update on the player who took the elbow to the schnoz. “Miranda Tate [is] now donning the mask a la [Chicago Bulls guard] Rip Hamilton,” he says.
As the game winds down, Eastern Michigan pulls ahead, and the game slips away from the Roos. Final score: Eastern Michigan 74, UMKC 69. K-ROO’s broadcasters have their own problem with the score.
“They won’t give us a player for an interview unless the team wins,” Witkowski explains off-air about UMKC’s athletics department.
Without postgame interviews, he says, it’s harder for the trio to put together decent clip reels to send to potential employers.
“It’s bullshit,” Witkowski says.
In the UMKC student union during the second week of January, Osburn, Tapp and Witkowski toil in a sweaty room to make their broadcasts relevant on campus. K-ROO’s radio geeks have given up their lengthy winter break to work in the station’s studio, on the student union’s third floor.
With red hair, a surface piercing on the left side of her face, and bright tattoos on her forearms, Osburn is the only member of K-ROO’s core staff who looks like a traditional college student. Her dry humor and wit are a check to Tapp and Witkowski’s thick banter, which occasionally veers broadcasts into boys-club territory.
The floor resembles the starship Enterprise, if the craft were decorated by Ikea. Brightly colored, oddly shaped furniture fills the space. The three spend the morning applying foam acoustic panels to the studio’s walls and printing stacks of fliers to distribute around campus. They’re also updating K-ROO’s website with a new logo. (The old image was phallic.) And they’re ordering K-ROO-branded koozies and bottle openers to give to students to help raise the station’s profile.
Their optimism verges on giddiness as they finalize a work schedule for the upcoming semester: A core member of the K-ROO staff will broadcast in the studio at all times, except from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m., when an automated program will stream music. When the student union is closed, K-ROO can be run from a remote laptop.
At the beginning of the year, K-ROO acquired a music license, so that its DJs can play any artist they want. (Previously they were playing only local and independent artists.) Today, they’re streaming a sonic hodgepodge, from Lady Gaga and Fun to local Kansas City bands and indie artists.
“That’s been a recruiting problem in the past,” Tapp says. “We couldn’t play everything all the time. And now we can play anything all the time. Except for when they shut the student union down on us and we have to do it from our house.”
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A Rick Hornyak song plays on-air. In the months before K-ROO’s music license, the station could play music only by artists who agreed not to take royalties. Hornyak was one of them and, therefore, in heavy rotation. Witkowski describes his songs: “If you took every ballad ever made by Lynyrd Skynyrd and had, like, a drunken Irishman singing.”
Osburn says she wants to avoid Top 40 tracks in the future, even though K-ROO is licensed. After all, this is college radio. And as a touring manager for bands, she values stations that give airtime to up-and-coming bands.
“Those places have been dear to my heart,” she says. “So I wanted to make K-ROO like that for bands.”
The K-ROO crew also plans to keep the air free of the seven banned words.
“We’re still going to follow FCC regulations with cursing and stuff,” Osburn says. “We don’t want to teach people bad habits, especially if they’re trying to get a job.”
K-ROO also keeps a log of every song played, even though its license doesn’t require it. Witkowski says it’s better for everyone to learn the FCC rules before they graduate and start looking for work.
“We’re using this to gain skills to go into radio, so we may as well,” he says.
That kind of maturity has bolstered K-ROO’s foundation, says Angela Elam, the station’s faculty adviser.
“There is a certain amount of altruism that comes from maturity,” says Elam, producer and host of the weekly public-radio show New Letters on the Air. “They realize that they’ve only got this for a short time personally, but it’s up to them to help try to sustain it.”
Elam has been working with students since 1999 to establish an online radio station. She says having a student-only radio outlet is crucial for UMKC, which doesn’t have a journalism school (students can get a degree with an emphasis in journalism) or a dedicated broadcast program. Students can apply for internships at KCUR, but those jobs are open to students of all area universities. The only qualification to work at K-ROO is being a UMKC student. Elam says that rule will fill a gap for students interested in radio.
“You’ve got to have a way to practice your craft,” Elam says. “I mean, you can learn theoretically about how to produce good radio. But if you’re not in there actually making it happen, then everything you think you might know in your head doesn’t necessarily translate into being good at it.”
Elam likes K-ROO’s odds of survival after this class graduates in May.
“Anybody who comes here to be trained by them will pick up on that enthusiasm,” she says. “There’s nothing more contagious than enthusiasm.”
The next Monday night is a big one for K-ROO. The staff is hosting the station’s first live remote of a weekly show called Mic’d at Mike’s, from 6 to 9 p.m. (The title Roos and Brews was nixed.) Osburn, Tapp and Witkowski broadcast from tables on a tiny stage, elevated about 6 inches above the floor, in the corner of the bar’s front room.
The show’s format is basic: The three do live segments and talk about the NFL playoffs, baseball’s Hall of Fame snubbing and the end of the NHL lockout. And they play recorded segments sandwiched by three-song sets.
They’ve snagged some swag to give to the audience: flashlights, pens and tickets promoting the recent horror film Mama. The initial crowd is sparse. A few guys play tabletop shuffleboard and watch an NBA game on a monitor over the K-ROO tables. A couple sitting at the bar appear oblivious to the broadcast.
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The show doesn’t go exactly as planned. They had scheduled live interviews with two UMKC men’s basketball players. Neither had a car, though, and the players were worried that if the hosts drove them, they would violate NCAA rules about the media providing transportation. So the K-ROO crew pretaped the interviews.
“I’m not quite sure I consider myself a member of the media yet,” Tapp says, introducing the interview. “I mean, we do have classes with these people, so it seems a little silly that we can’t give them a ride.”
In the midst of getting guests onstage, ordering $4 pitchers of PBR, and making sure the recorded parts are playing properly, they’re hit with bad news. K-ROO’s funding has been withdrawn by the school.
Osburn, Tapp and Witkowski appear unfazed. They’d rather focus on the show and socialize with friends hanging out in front of the broadcast table. The show rolls on.
The trio interviews Mike’s redheaded barkeep, Avery. They left a jar on the bar for patrons to submit questions for the segment. Several of the questions are too racy to ask on-air, but the interview is the most intriguing part of the night. The audience, which has grown to a couple of dozen friends, is paying attention now. The hosts didn’t bring speakers, so the crowd is quiet in order to hear the questions and answers.
The show also features a trivia game and Tapp’s eight-and-half-minute radio drama, The Hunt for the Phantom Cat.
At 9 p.m., Witkowski ends the episode with a modest plug for next week’s edition of Mic’d at Mike’s. “Check us out next week,” he says.
Weeks after pulling K-ROO’s funding, the university reversed course.
Angela Cottrell, director of UMKC’s Office of Student Involvement, met with the K-ROO staff to discuss why the funding dried up. She discovered that in 2010, Mel Tyler, associate vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment, said he wouldn’t allocate K-ROO’s funding because no progress was being made. Cottrell told Tyler about the station’s advancement, and the money was released.
Tapp, Witkowski and Osburn were in the mood to celebrate during their fourth edition of Mic’d at Mike’s. They’ve brought speakers on this Monday night so the audience can hear the show.
Witkowski tells The Pitch that the money will allow the station to host concerts and buy new studio equipment, which is important because the sound-mixing board broke earlier in the week.
“It puts us in a position where we don’t have to worry that if something breaks, we’re out of business,” Witkowski says.
Osburn remembers the long, pointless K-ROO meetings from a few years ago and the uncommitted volunteers. Picking at a plate of nachos, she admits that K-ROO seemed like a long shot until last November.
“No, I definitely didn’t think that I would be sitting here at Mike’s having the equipment to broadcast,” she says.
All three are on track to graduate in May. They fear for K-ROO’s future.
“That’s rough, making sure that there’s someone like us to keep doing this,” Osburn says. “Part of me wants to go to grad school just to make sure it happens.”
But Witkowski, Tapp and Osburn will have to trust that the new crop of DJs will turn K-ROO into a UMKC institution.
“Ryan and I always joke that the studio is going to be named after us someday,” Osburn says. “That’s a terrible name for a studio. Like, ‘Hey, guys, let’s go to the Osburn-Witkowski Studio to do some radio!’ “
