Connor's Story
Growing up in Colorado, Connor spent his childhood playing and watching sports with his family. Following in the steps of his dad, Michael, and older brother, Alec, he developed a love for hockey. He played roller hockey until middle school, where he began to grow an affinity towards basketball.
Throughout middle school and high school, Connor started to develop an interest in sports broadcasting. He loved every part of the process; the graphics, the cameras, the interviews, and of course, the commentary.
Looking at colleges, he chose to attend MSU Denver, which offers a well-renowned journalism and broadcasting degree. Early into his freshman year, he found an opportunity to volunteer his time with the athletics department in helping to put together online broadcasts of the school's home games for volleyball, soccer, basketball, and baseball/softball.
Initially interested in all of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the sports broadcast, he occasionally got the opportunity to call play-by-play or color for volleyball and basketball. Connor felt right at home being the voice that narrates the action and providing key insight into the game, deciding to turn his attention exclusively into developing his play-by-play.
In order to maximize his play-by-play opportunities, he began to dip his toes into radio during his junior year. Calling a mixture of both TV games with MSU Denver athletics and radio games with student-operated Met Media, he transitioned towards radio exclusively in his senior year. In radio, Connor started off using borrowed equipment through Met Media before investing in his own equipment to make it easy to set up and call any game he wanted.
In addition, Connor also tried his hand hosting a weekly half-hour sports show interviewing coaches and players, as well as a self-produced sports talk show with Met Media. He also briefly wrote game recaps and sports features for The Metropolitan, a student-produced newspaper. You can see some examples of these works, as well as class examples here.
Connor graduated from MSU Denver in December of 2020 with Cum Laude and a GPA of 3.84. He landed his first sports broadcasting job in February of 2021, working for Media Logic Radio. He is the Sports Director for KRDZ-AM in Wray, CO, calling play-by-play for a competitive 2A high school team in basketball, baseball, softball, football, volleyball, and wrestling. He got to cover Wray's first-ever boys basketball state championship in 2021 as well as another championship run for the team in 2023. He also covered the 2022 Colorado 1A football state championship game for Wray in their deepest postseason run since 2010.
Part of Connor's job in Wray is to be an on-air host weekday mornings for KRDZ-AM, Wray's classic hits radio station. He won a Colorado Broadcasters Association 2021 Certificate of Merit for Best Morning Show in a small market. His other duties include programming for two radio stations, imaging for one station, scheduling Avalanche, Nuggets, Broncos, and Rockies games on one station and programming the breaks for those games, updating one station's website, producing 90-second local sports updates for one station and conducting local community interviews featured on three of the company's stations.
Connor meticulously prepares for each and every game he calls, putting in hours of research towards relevant statistics, team and player trends, and more in order to see how they win, which areas they excel, and which areas are lacking.
It's one thing to simply narrate the action; it's another to tell a story.