Over the last semester, I have been a member of Illinois Tech Athletics Department’s Sports Information and Directing (SID) crew as Public Announcer (PA). You might recognize us at athletics events with a black shirt that has a hawk on the front, and lettering on the back that spells SID. Our crew is lead by Sports Information (SI) Director Eric Willuweit, and Assistant Sports Information Director Ryan Cantlin, who is also an assistant coach for the baseball and women’s basketball teams. Our crew consists of photographers, PA members, statistics spotters (or stats spotters), and camera workers (for outside games). I am part of the PA and camera crew, though my primary role within SID is to be a PA worker.
As a PA worker, the main part of my job is to announce significant events during a game and starting lineups. If you ever go to a Scarlet Hawk game on campus, chances are, you will hear me speak. Right now, I am working a variety of basketball and volleyball games. Soon, we will start lacrosse and baseball season once temperatures warm up a bit. As an announcer though, it is also my job to have that “announcer” voice. Believe it or not, keeping that voice up can be very difficult, especially when you have to project your voice from time to time. However, keeping with games is an even bigger challenge.
When announcing basketball or volleyball games, these kinds of matches have quite a bit of heft to them, with fouls, violations, points, player substitutions, and even other small matters that need to be announce within seconds notice. Understanding referee hand signals is important and extremely difficult when you have very little experience doing such a job. I still have trouble sometimes when doing basketball matches, which are usually very fast paced matches that have many events to be announced within the match. This fast paced environment is genuinely very difficult to get used to in the first few games. But once you understand the rules of the game, it can be quite easy to recognize when to announce each event.
All in all, announcing is a great job for those who enjoy watching athletics matches and like putting themselves out there. I find the job quite fun, and even though I may not like some of the sports I announce, its still amazing to watch our athletes work as a team to get wins for our school. If you ever need a fun activity to watch while on campus during these cold winter months, look up the next game on the Illinois Tech Athletics website. You never know how fascinating these games can be until you’ve sat down to watch them.