If Streetsboro High School communications teacher and Station 88.9 WTSB-FM General Manager Bob Long has learned anything while working in the radio business for over 40 years, it is that if someone does not move forward then they fall behind. Under Long’s direction and leadership, the student-owned 88.9 WSTB-FM station has stayed current by adding Rocket Radio Cybercast, a live sports streaming broadcast.
“The kids who have done it do it live on the Cybercast,” Long told The Weekly Villager. “It is live play-by-play. It is not recorded and played back later. When we do games, I have three kids involved, one is an engineer, one play-by-play and one analyst. Those are all high school students.”
Students who have participated in the Rocket Radio Cybcrcasts since its inception in 2014, they have received extra credit but also live broadcasting experience to help prepare them for a career in television or radio.
Having been a student-owned radio station since being founded in 1972, station 88.9 has served as a non-commercial educational radio system licensed to the Streetsboro school district.
Long said that despite the station still having a significant following, it was not reaching as many ears as before because people stopped using FM radios. In order to keep up with the changing times, the station developed the Rocket Radio Cybcrcast.
“It was getting hard to even find one in the house and mobile devices like cell phones became the method of listening to things,” noted Long. “I really felt we could probably expand our audience by broadcasting the sports events.”
Long said that the station originally tried a livestream broadcast of a Streetsboro boys’ basketball game in 2013 but their attempt was not successful because they did not have the proper equipment.
After doing some more research, the station tried it again in the early winter of 2014, livestreaming another Rocket boys’ basketball game and the results were better.
The Cybercast involved two broadcasters, one play-by-play analyst, one color commentator, and a student engineer. The Cybercast exclusively covered Streetsboro boys’ basketball for a year before its coverage expanded to football in the fall of 2015.
According to Long, it was challenging finding students who could broadcast a Streetsboro football game because football was more complicated to cover than basketball. He enlisted Streetsboro math teacher and statistician Ryan Spence and junior high assistant football coach Ed Tuma to cover the football games.
Even though Tuma and Spence broadcast the game, the Cybercast still needed a student-engineer for production.
The Cybercast continued for eight more seasons only covering 10 Streetsboro boys’ basketball games a season. Although the new program was successful, Long acknowledged he struggled finding students to participate in the live broadcast because of their busy schedules. Once more students started to participate, that allowed the Rocket Radio Cybercast to expand its coverage.
“They just did not have the time to do it but finally I was able to make this a big enough deal and when they found out this was really cool, they were okay with it, and arranged their schedules with work they could take some time off to do sports,” Long said.
Last spring, Rocket Radio Cybercasts covered some baseball and the expansion carried over into the winter season the Cybercast covered 10 Streetsboro girls’ basketball games.
The coverage of the Streetsboro girls required three other students to join the program and soon another reporter was added to the Cybercast.
“We added a thing called Behind the Bench,” Long said. “I decided to let us work out something where we could have a student on the broadcast down on the floor right behind the bench doing a coaches’ interview at halftime during and after the game.”
At one point, the Rocket Radio Cybercast only had three participating members but with the addition of covering the Rocket girls’ basketball games and a floor reporter for each coverage team, eight students were involved with the live streaming and broadcast of Streetsboro basketball games this past winter.
“It took awhile for people to get used to the fact that basketball games were on their phone and that was new stuff but that is where people were going and it became quite a hit actually,” Long said.
The Rocket Radio Cybercast will stay busy this spring, covering 10 baseball games and will also have a dugout reporter to provide updates from Streetsboro’s side of the diamond in between innings.
