STARKVILLE — With summer school classes winding down, activity on some parts of the Mississippi State University campus has slowed to a snail’s pace.
The same can’t be said for the offices of radio station WMSV 91.1 FM, which is in the heart of the campus. Just outside the station’s broadcast booth, Anthony Craven and Steve Ellis sit around a table and plan that day’s edition of Southeastern Drive Time, a one-hour call-in sports show, heard at 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“Well, tonight we will start with Penn State. That one is fairly obvious,” Craven said Monday. “Unlike other sports shows, we try not to limit ourselves to one topic. Rarely do you have that standout topic, especially during the summer. Tonight, the start of the show is easy and we go from there.”
On Monday morning, the NCAA announced unprecedented penalties against the Penn State University football program for the cover-up of a sex abuse scandal that involved longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. The Nittany Lions will lose 20 scholarships and will be banned from postseason play for the next four seasons. The NCAA also ruled that former coach Joe Paterno will have to vacate 111 wins, which means he no longer is the winningest coach in the history of major college football, and the school will pay a $60M fine.
Craven and Ellis have co-hosted Southeastern Drive Time, which will celebrate its seventh anniversary Aug. 1, since its inception. In 2003, Ellis hatched the idea for an hour-long sports information show. First called “Bulldog Drive Time,” the show started in the back room of WMSV and immediately drew a following.
“We were trying to bring an informative show to the public, something out of the norm,” Ellis said. “Initially, we were on WMSV and WMOX out of Meridian. Someone there had heard the show and asked if they could carry the broadcast. At that time, (WMSV was) broadcasting our program and Southern Sports Tonight.”
Southern Sports Tonight had multiple runs and names as a syndicated radio talk show. In its last reincarnation, Southern Sports Tonight unexpectedly pulled the plug on its broadcast midway through 2005.
“A few of the affiliates carrying Southern Sports Tonight called and encouraged us to syndicate our show,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know very much about how to syndicate a radio program. I was not sure of the satellite details or the best ways to distribute the program.”
Despite the initial hesitance, Ellis and Craven, who had then returned to work on the program after a few years out of radio, thought the idea was too good to pass up. Former MSU student Aaron Sones, who now works in broadcasting in Georgia, helped Ellis find the best way to syndicate the program.
“A lot of credit goes to Steve for doing so much of the legwork in the early years,” Craven said. “He had a vision for what type of show we could produce. He worked extremely hard to find radio stations willing to take a chance on our broadcast. At the time, I was teaching school. He would have all the copy prepared for that night’s show. All I had to do was come in and help guide the ship. It was an incredible opportunity, and Steve made sure we took full advantage of it.”
In that summer of 2005, Southeastern Drive Time was born. As many as 17 stations have carried the program in its seven-year run. The current affiliate list features 12 stations, including nine in the state of Mississippi. Some sports fans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia can hear the nightly broadcast. An on-line stream and podcast are available through the WMSV web site.
“We strive for a show with balance,” Ellis said. “Some shows are nothing but callers. I listen to those and I wonder, ‘Who is hosting the show … the hosts or the callers?’ We want informative guests to go along with the callers. We have regular callers like everyone else. The challenge is to keep them on target.
“We spent part of our day preparing an informative show, and it is our job to make sure the callers do not take us off topic.”
Craven, WMSV’s news director, spends parts of the work day preparing for the show. The prep work for Southeastern Drive Time increases after WMSV’s 30-minute newscast ends at noon.
“Show preparation can be everything from Twitter to message boards to press releases,” Craven said. “Throughout the day, I will bookmark links and drop stories that matter into a desktop folder on my computer. We come on late in the day, so most people know the main headlines of the day. We try to inform and entertain and put the news of that day in proper context.”
Now that the show is established, Ellis and Craven can choose from a number of guests. From radio broadcasters to newspaper beat writers to magazine editors to coaches, the hour is usually full of engaging guests.
“We attempt to have four of five sources from each school in the Southeastern Conference,” Ellis said. “Since our station is on the Mississippi State campus, a lot of people automatically think the show is all about State. However, we don’t play favorites, and the show is all about the Southeastern Conference.
“If an event happens at the University of Kentucky, we will try to find someone from that area who can appear on the show and be informative about the big topic of that day.”
Ellis, WMSV’s general manager since its inception, said only minor changes are made to the show’s content each year. This year, the changes will include bringing fans more information about new SEC members Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri.
“Some people would say no one here cares about Texas A&M,” Ellis said. “But that is so wrong. They are in the SEC’s Western Division and will now be a division rival of Mississippi State. A lot of people here know the MSU news. They do not know about Texas A&M, so we try to bring a little bit of Texas A&M and Missouri to our listeners.
“The whole conference is tied together. We try to cover 14 schools. Anthony and I cannot do that on our own. Instead, we bring in that beat writer or that radio broadcaster that knows that school inside and out.”
The hosts try to maintain that diversity in the topics they cover.
“Some sports call-in shows talk football 12 months out of the year,” Craven said. “We don’t do that. After the bowl season and the national championship game are over, we put football to bed for that year and really get heavy into basketball. Do you talk spring football? Yes. Do we make it a focal point of the show? No. I think our fan base really appreciates that. They enjoy the diversity.”
Ellis feels the show’s college baseball coverage may be the nation’s best. With MSU part of the nation’s premier baseball conference, it is easy to see why SEBaseball.Com editor Mark Etheridge and writer Barry Allen are well-received guests in the spring.
“The challenge in this business is to remain open-minded,” Ellis said. “You have to be ready to adapt to change because that is a major underlying theme of the radio industry. So many local stations have been sold to larger corporate groups. We are the opposite in that we are a community station on the campus of a major university.”
Now 18 years old, WMSV operates at 14,000 watts, which is a large range for a station on a university campus. WMSV may be heard as far as south as Meridian and as far east as the outskirts of Tuscaloosa, Ala. The original purpose of the stations holds true today. WMSV is designed to be a public relations tool for the university.
“Stations do not pay to carry our program,” Ellis said. “However, we have two types of commercial breaks. All of the network breaks have a couple of MSU spots and they have to be carried by all of the stations. This is a huge marketing tool for our university. (MSU) gets free advertising on all of these stations throughout the Southeast. That was the main selling point to the powers-that-be.”
As of a couple of years ago, Southeastern Drive Time was the lone syndicated sports call-in show originating from a college campus. Ellis believes the program still may have that rare distinction. Despite recent competition from the now one-year-old syndicated statewide radio talk program Head to Head, Ellis and Craven feel like their program can continue to deliver to its avid followers.
“We try to be informative and we try to entertain,” Craven said. “I think being one hour in length really helps us move our program along. We are fast-paced, and I think we get a lot done on a daily basis. It feels good each night to see tangible proof of the hard work you have put in all day.”
Said Ellis, “Sports is not the be-all, end-all of the world. I think we sometimes laugh about our how serious other shows take themselves. On this day, we talk Penn State, and that is serious. However, most sports stories are entertaining. I think our approach is what separates us from others.”
ON THE AIR
Southeastern Drive Time can be heard from 5-6 p.m. Monday through Friday on WMSV 91.1 FM and 11 other stations in the state of Mississippi and the Southeast. An audio stream of the show can be found on the WMSV website.
Scott was sports editor for The Dispatch.
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