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USA Sports Show

Monday, 03 October 2011 10:03

Students spreading the word on Jaguar sports

For most, if not all sports fans, it has become a nightly event. You get home from a long day of work, class or just from somewhere that you can’t be fully plugged in. Your head is filled with questions, and you’re dying to know what has happened in the world of sports today. This is where your local or national sports show comes in. The local news and radio, sports websites, social media and of course, the mother of them all, SportsCenter is the fix you’re looking for.

At South Alabama students have taken the initiative to fill this void for students on and off campus. Michael Brannon, Braden Cheek and Ryan Roach were doing an assignment in a broadcast news class at USA when they created a sports show. Over the summer, Cheek and Brannon talked about doing this show full-time, and the USA Sports Show was created.

“We were kind of going for a SportsCenter feel or a highlight show but highlighting South Alabama athletics,” Brannon said.

“This year, we are doing something different. We have something called Jag Nation, and that was Braden’s idea, and it was kind of modeled after SportsNation, but instead of bars and graphs we have actual people yell at us. It makes it more fun.”

The show is filmed live every Monday at 9 p.m., and if you want to be a part of the live audience all you have to do is show up by 8:30 p.m. Also, if you can’t catch the show on Mondays when it’s live, you can watch throughout the week on Jag TV and listen on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. on Jag Radio.

“We like to have as many people [as possible] come,” Cheek said. “You don’t have to be a broadcaster or anything, and you can come and if you don’t like what I can do, you can yell at me.”

Also, the Sports Show anchors have delved into social media as most sports shows and sports personalities have now done to expand their following. “We are big into the social media,” Brannon said. “We utilize Facebook, Twitter, Ustream, YouTube because if we can captivate an audience online, we can do it on TV and radio.”

“Our goal is to promote South Alabama athletics as best we can,” Brannon said. “We just want to be able to show students and coaches around that the students and coaches care about sports here at South as well as sports around the nation.”

Cheek and Brannon have made a few changes since the beginning of their show. Their former co-host Ryan Roach graduated last year and has since been replaced with freshman Colton Bradford. Also the Sports Show guys have started doing play-by-play at the Jag football games.

“Matt McCoy from 107.3 The Groove, who is also an adjunct professor, came to us after class and said the vice president of the University wants to hear play-by-play on Jag Radio in the fall and that sounded really cool,” Brannon said. “We had never done that before, but we had entertained the thought, and at the beginning part of August we got together with Matt, and he got some stuff set up for us.

“The first game, it was a little rough around the edges but the next game against Lamar, it went flawless. We had over 400 hits. We went from 40 the first week to 400 the next. We like to make it with as much student involvement as we can on anything we do here. It’s all for the students.”

Written by Jayson Curry | Sports Editor

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