Humans of St. Norbert:

“I want to be a sports broadcaster so last year, I started calling the [Kiel girls’ basketball] games that worked with my schedule when I wasn’t playing. Then this year with [the SNC] basketball season being canceled and being home for an extended period of time, I thought it would be a good next step to get more game experience. Before January, it was all radio games so I would do all the home games and all of the away games on internet radio. Then starting in the second week of January, we ended up working to get a software so we could link up our video with the audio. I ran all the graphics with the broadcast and did all the play-by-play.

“I didn’t do any games by myself. I had different people do them with me. So I had former teammates do it, our high school athletic director, our elementary school principal ... just people that I knew. It made it easier for me to just have somebody to talk with. By the end, I had one guy that I did most of the games with so I developed a pretty good chemistry with him and we were pretty good just working off each other.

“One of [the SNC assistant] basketball coaches knows Kevin Harlan so I got to have a conversation with him. I called him on the phone and he was on his way to call a March Madness NCAA tournament game. It was really cool! I have a sheet of notes from that call just talking about what I can work on. He talked to me about voice quality and finding my tone and mastering that. He told me to listen and watch others in the business and learn from them. Not copy them, but to develop a style through what’s proven to have worked.

“Just turning lemons into lemonade. That’s how I looked at it. It was disappointing not having a basketball season at St. Norbert, but you know what? It worked out alright.” – Connor Voelker ’24