Once you have the seven fundamentals of basketball play-by-play down cold, these five bonus tips will help make you a star!

1. Be clear about which team has the ball

This is the most common mistake in basketball play-by-play. There are a lot of changes of possession in basketball. You can’t count on all of your listeners knowing which team has it based only upon the names of the players.

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How would you answer this question: What bad sportscasting advice do you hear being shared most often?

The bad advice I hear most often is that painting the picture is the most important aspect of great play-by-play. Painting the picture is important, but there’s something that’s more important.Read More

One of the toughest challenges for play-by-play broadcasters are pregame and postgame interviews. They can easily get monotonous because you feel like you are asking the same questions over and over again.

Keep this in mind, though: Every interview should be different because each game is different.

Here are some suggestions for keeping your interviews fresh. We’ll address postgame first, because it will partially set-up the following pregame interview as well.
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The first time I broadcast football play-by-play without an analyst was 1989, McPherson (KS) High School versus Ark City. For a reason I don’t remember, my regular analyst was unavailable that night. What I do remember is what I felt.

Sheer. Terror.

At that point, my football broadcast experience was limited to a handful of games. Carrying a two-hour broadcast by myself seemed impossible. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. As it turns out, the things I learned that night carried me though the rest of my football play-by-play career.
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Broadcasting consistently with the same play-by-play analyst helps your games sound great. You can anticipate when your analyst is going to speak and he knows when you need to have the mike back.

Unfortunately, working consistently with the same play-by-play analyst is more the exception than the rule, especially in the early stages of a broadcasting career.

Here are four tips to instantly help your play-by-play analyst sound great.
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Memorizing play-by-play rosters can be hard. Most of us aren’t Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.

For those of us who can’t remember what we ate for breakfast this morning, here are several techniques you can try for memorizing play-by-play rosters. There were initially seven but we’ve updated the post to add more:
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Do you know what’s scary? Calling a girl for the first time to ask for a date. Do you know what else is scary? Calling three hours of baseball by yourself.

When our former president Ronald Reagan was a sportscaster in Iowa, he called baseball by himself, and he wasn’t even at the ball park. The news ticker would tell him what each batter did, but it wouldn’t give details of the at-bats. Reagan had to fill in those details using his imagination.

If Ronald Reagan could excel at calling baseball solo, you can too.
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