First Career Hockey Broadcast -- Advice Needed

[Aaron Morse]

Hello all!

Wednesday is my first career hockey broadcast. It's a radio broadcast of a high school boy's hockey game up here in Maine.

My background is very much in baseball, basketball, and football.

I would appreciate any advice this community has for hockey play-by-play, any resources I should check out, etc. so I can make my first hockey broadcast as high quality as possible.

Thanks!!

--Aaron

[PhilGiubileo]

Aaron,

Congrats on the opportunity to call your first hockey game! While you might work more in other sports--calling hockey on radio is quite addicting! In terms of sheer game calling, there's little dead space and you really get to focus on describing the action itself, which to me is the most fun!

There's a lot that can be covered, but since it is your first hockey call, and I'm going to assume that you've never gone as far as even doing a hockey demo, then you'll really want to try and keep things simple, because if you do too much, you can get yourself in trouble.

Since I do consulting and coaching of hockey announcers on the side, I'm not going to reveal all of my trade secrets, but a few things to keep in mind:

1. Know the rules! Very important to make sure that you're up to speed with all of the rules/penalty signs. You have to know the difference between roughing and boarding--or any other penalty for that matter!

2. Don't get caught up in describing every pass. It's HS hockey, so the players will skate slower than they do at higher levels, but if you're not used to the speed--and it's a bit faster than basketball or football--you can get caught behind the play quite easily.

3. Time and score is very important--due to the nature of the play, you can go minutes sometimes w/o a natural stoppage in play--make sure to work the time and score often, as you would in every sport.

4. Know the rosters backwards and forwards. Assuming each side is rolling four lines and skating 18 players, it's a lot to remember with constant line changes--it's not basketball where a coach might have a 7-8 man rotation, and even then, the starters spend most of the time on the floor. Bonus points if you can get the lines from the coaches in advance, but more often you'll want to watch each team run through the lines during warm up--it's usually around halfway through the warm up.

5. Make sure you have a scoresheet--these are the ones that I designed and use to this day--a number of other pro guys use them too:

http://www.playbyplay.biz/wp-content/up ... Hockey.pdf

Good luck and enjoy the call!

[LA_Riot]

I have covered exactly one hockey game in my career and I wrote about the experience here:
http://www.sportscasterlife.com/guest-p ... xperience/

[ktomasch]

What Phil said.

To which I would add: hockey is hard. Understand going in that in the first period, you're just trying to get into it at 20:00, out of it at 0:00 (I don't know how long high school hockey periods are, maybe they're shorter) and not drop an f-bomb in-between.

Second period, don't give up. It will get a little better. If you can identify players, not try to describe each and every pass (especially in the attacking team's defensive zone) and not drop an f-bomb, you're 2/3 of the way there.

Third period, hopefully you can recognize the players more easily, you will feel more comfortable and you might get a good call of something.

Above all, DO NOT expect you are going to sound or feel like Doc Emrick in game one. Don't get discouraged. My first period of hockey way back when was so bad, I could not believe it and wanted to just pack it in. Second period got a little better. That whole first season was a learning experience. But I was better by the end of it than I had been in that first period.

ABOVE ALL, do not do this.

[PhilGiubileo]

Do not do this, either.

https://youtu.be/3wqz9YR2iSg

[bschultz]

Know the players names and numbers. You will NOT have time to look down...EVER.

Say the score

Say where the puck is...and who has it. Just who has it isn't enough.

Have fun!

[JimRiley]

I did one hockey game and it was high school. They did not rotate four lines; maybe 10 different kids got significant ice time so it was easier to learn them

One interesting rule here was a player fouls out if he accumulates seven penalty minutes

[JimRiley]

and by all means skip this reaction too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khhXXvTf4Os

[Aaron Morse]

Thanks to everyone for the advice! I had a blast.