500 Episodes, Over 10 Years, Our Podcast Keeps Going…

In an attention starved, get it done yesterday world it’s sometimes nice to find consistency. Your friends you have known, the right slice of pizza or cup of coffee, a musical artist who knows just the right notes to play, Opening Day in Baseball etc. etc.

Things can adjust, but the core thoughts…the core sounds, the core feelings take you back, and as much as we chase the shiny toy, the retro ones sometime have the most value.

It is with that in mind that my friend and colleague Tom Richardson (as well as our frequent contributor from the road Scott Rosner and stops with LJ Holmgren as well) hits a bit of a milestone this week with our 500^th podcast episode, done over the course of more than ten years from places near and far, and mostly since the Pandemic via Zoom. You can scroll through all of them here.

We started the podcast after a business colleague of mine introduced me to a business development person at USA Today. They were starting to do some audio pieces and were wondering if I would be interested in venturing into podcasting on sports business with him. I didn’t really know how or why but I’m always curiously open to new things, so I said sure.

Then my friend left his job at Gannett the week before we were going to do the first one, and the audio division never really launched (ironically, we had another conversation about doing something tied to sports gambling at the time but Gannett officials didn’t see a market in it at the time. Oops.)

So with the idea in my head I asked our colleagues at Columbia about moving the idea to the program. We would need some equipment, some student interest and maybe some space, and I mentioned it to Tom to be cohost. Just like that off we went…quite literally.

We started with our students and some faculty…our first one that actually worked was with former WNBA player Iciss Tillis telling us about how she had her appendix removed in some dank hospital while playing in Russia…and it kind of went from there. The goal was to entice people to come to campus, or to go to people’s offices, and take it from there. We recorded in basement classrooms, 5^th Avenue offices, for a while we actually found a recording studio in Teachers College that no one was using, but we figured it out and kept going. There was usually one trademark in those first few years; no matter where we ended up on campus there was a siren of a fire truck or police car or an ambulance going by.

Sometimes it was a little edgy, the early program we used went out of business but we saved the audio files, and on we went…until The Pandemic hit, and while we only paused for a bit, this new platform called Zoom gave us the remote ability to record and share we never had. Our student producers got better with the technology, we eventually were asked to move it to Substack which helped with discoverability, and we kept going to today. (While we have taken the podcast “on the road” to Media Row at Super Bowl and the Sloan MIT Conference, Tom and I have actually only done a few in the same room, which was last spring when colleague Adam Honig offered us space at the Mets pop up house in Manhattan.)

So why keep doing it with a little limited reach, no real financial incentive and limited time in busy lives? The reason why we should do things…curious learning. Every one of the 500 plus we walk away having learned something more through a guest or two, and we hope the listeners, many of whom are students and industry professionals, walk away having learned something that maybe they can apply to their jobs, their interests, their community. It doesn’t have to always be about the Benjamins.

We also try to find topics and guests that tell a narrative that can’t be heard elsewhere. Sure, we have had commissioners, coaches, team owners, brand marketing heads in the mix, but oftentimes the most interest guests have become those from the fringe, to those starting businesses, or students and alums just getting things going who weave a story you don’t get in other places. Pro fishing, fencing, niche media platforms, AI, legal issues, F1 and chess boxing, STEM and bullriding, we have had them all. We also love seeing where those up and comers or career changers who have joined us end up  going, each conversation takes us to a place of discovery we weren’t planning on, with what we hope is a diverse lineup that keep growing as long as we are allowed to continue.

So there ya have it. We started a podcast before it was really a thing, and have kept it moving along (we think it’s now the second longest running one on sports business behind Brian Berger’s Sports Business Radio), and like my newsletter (now 17+ years in on that as well) we will keep adjusting, jiving and hopefully thriving, with some fun conversations and new friends made along the way.

Thanks to all who have taken the time out of their busy days to join us for usually less than an hour, and especially thanks to the students, alums and staff who have chipped in their valuable time as well.

Want to join us? Let us know!

It continues to be fun learning for us, and hopefully for the community who joins us, and we will see you down the road.