Mike Couzens grew up listening to the radio in White Plains, New York. So it's no surprise that when he got to Syracuse, he immediately gravitated to both WJPZ and WAER, spending far more time in those facilities than on coursework.
Today he tells us about being surprised, as a sports guy, when his predecessor Alex Silverman suggested he run for General Manager. Throughout this episode, Mike talks about lessons he learned as GM, and how knowing "all aspects" of a broadcast help in his current play-by-play role at ESPN. And while the sports department had "one of their own" in that role, Mike was always cognizant of the push-pull between music and sports. The station didn't only flourish with its play-by-play. The station launched a competition for local musicians, had a presence at the annual Mayfest, aired its public affairs show, Orange State, and more.
Mike takes us through his career post-graduation, using the Syracuse network, and never saying no to an opportunity. That includes covering volleyball and wrestling, and driving 12 hours round trip to call a game in Wisconsin. His career path wound through the Midwest, had a stop in Vermont, and eventually wound up with him at ESPN.
This year, he's moved closer to his roots - doing less games on television and more on radio. We talk about the power and opportunity that comes with calling games on the radio.
Join Us in Syracuse on March 4th: https://bit.ly/WJPZ50BanquetTickets
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast is produced by Jon Gay '02 and JAG in Detroit Podcasts
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon JAG Gay. I'm joined today by Mike Couzens, now with ESPN, former as WJPZ General Manager from the class of 2011. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today.
Mike: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
JAG: So, walk us through how you came to the station, how you came to Syracuse, how you came up through the ranks to eventually be a rarity in that you're a sports guy who became the GM.
Mike: Well, Syracuse was the only school that I applied to. I applied early decision, so that meant that by December of my senior year of high school, I knew that's where I was going to end up. And when I got there, I knew a lot about WAER because when you go on the campus tour, I think that's the one that gets highlighted more than Z89.
And so when I got there, I was actually a basketball manager first for the team. So that was the thing that I spent most of my time on. In my first, I would say semester and a half on campus, because I played high school basketball was not good enough to play anywhere at the next level. Certainly not at a division one school.
So my high school coach had asked me if I wanted to be a basketball manager. And so I said sure. So the first day after I unpacked my dorm and I went over to the basketball offices and they said, sure, as long as you can show up and rebound, you'll be good to be a manager. And so I did that probably until about February of my freshman year.
So that was 2007 into 2008. And I realized that I didn't really want to spend all my time doing that because I think I ate more dinners at the Marshall Square Mall Subway than I did actually at the dining hall because they were closed by the time I was walking back from basketball practice. So that was when I really threw myself into doing stuff at Z89.
And it started out as just writing practice sports updates once a week. So Tim Swartz was the sports director then and is still one of my really good friends, which I'm sure will be a constant theme throughout all of this. And that's how I got started. And later on in my freshman year, I would go in for the Z Morning Zoo once a week and I would do three sports updates.
And it was to the point where, I didn't yet have key card access to the building, so I'd have to knock on the door at say 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning and and hope that whoever was hosting the Zoo was there by that point. Otherwise, you're standing out there in the dark and the cold with no way to get into the building.
JAG: Different knock at the door than Rick Wright, right? Not the...
Mike: Another ever present theme. And that was really how I got started, was just trying to do anything that I could to get my foot in the door. Sports update-wise, while I was following a similar path over at WAER. You go in once a week and write sports updates, and that's how you eventually get someone to start letting you in the building on a regular basis.
JAG: So I feel like there are some folks who we've interviewed who have felt they had to choose between JPZ and AER. But you kept it with it and did both, right?
Mike: I did. And that was all four years with both of those. And I don't think that you have to choose, and I hope that future generations of people don't feel that way.
I say this not with any disrespect toward the curriculum at Newhouse. I probably spent for every one hour in the Newhouse buildings, 10 hours inside of student radio buildings, and that might be a conservative estimate because that was the stuff that I really wanted to be doing. Whether it was you come in for an assignment, you're doing,we call them packages for the sports broadcast of a feature story, or whenever it might be, three minutes.
But then you hang out and you BS with your friends for a couple hours after that, or you go over to the Kimmel Dining Hall, RIP to the Kimmel, Taco Bell and all other great, Dunkin, and everything else over there. But that was what became the core of my friend group then. It's the core of my friend group today.
And if I wasn't doing something at one place, I was probably spending time over at the other, because I think another luxury of a Newhouse education is that, you know, you have your arts and sciences classes and whatever the case. But you don't really have homework. The work was done in the three or four hours you were in class, and then you had all that extra time outside to go do the other stuff.
So I never felt busy doing both because it was exactly the places that I wanted to be.
JAG: How did you start to rise through management at JPZ, starting doing sports during the morning show, at the same time you're going to class, you know, spend a couple minutes here and there, but you're also doing a lot of stuff at AER? How did you decide to get into rising through the ranks of the executive staff at Z89?
Mike: You know, I was looking back through some old emails in preparation for this, realizing, wow, I've probably saved far more emails than is really necessary. Because these are emails from 2008 and 2009. And I came across, the resignation letter for Alex Silverman during his tenure as the general manager.
He was in that spot from 2008 to 2009. And Alex and I became close during his tenure as the GM. And I don't know if it was really more of a matter of me just spending a lot of time at the station. Because during breaks, whether it's Thanksgiving or winter break, there's still sports broadcasts that are happening.
You know, my generation had the luxury of being able to run things in automation during breaks rather than people having to stay there. So the time commitment was a little bit different. But if the women's basketball team was playing on the road at Georgetown, someone still needed to be in the studio to host that show, to run the board for that show.
Sure. And so I volunteered to do a lot of those things, because I lived four hours away where I grew up. And so whether it was staying up there at somebody's house or in an apartment on south campus or just driving back up for a broadcast and spending, I think I spent a lot of time probably getting to know Alex in that way.
And so I distinctly remember this conversation one night where, this was my sophomore year and I lived on south campus and so did Alex, and I don't know why I remember that he had a bright yellow Jeep, but he did. And so, he drove me back to South campus one day and said something to the effect of, and Alex will probably remember this more closely because he has a mind like no other.
JAG: Sure.
Mike: But I feel like I remembered him saying, you know, I'd like you to apply for the general manager position. And at that time, I was not on the executive staff. You know, I was just a guy doing sports updates and hoping to get the occasional play by play experience. And so it was really overwhelming to me to have that put out there.
But the more I thought about it, this was the place where I was spending all my time. I was really passionate about it. And I think the biggest challenge coming into that was that I didn't, you know, I read this book about the rise and fall of General Electric and how they wanted people who were going to be the CEO to have worked in multiple parts of the company.
And I hadn't done that, you know, doing on air shifts with music or doing any of the other, behind the scenes stuff outside of sports. And so I was definitely thrown in, really trying to tread water. But I still think that it's one of the greatest experiences that I had in college because it teaches you how to manage a budget, how to manage people.
It's basically a full-time job. You have a six-figure budget, but none of the oversight necessarily that comes with it like a real job does because you're the one who's in charge.
JAG: That is something else. And so you take on the GM role, Alex kind of suggests that you take over for him when he's done.
And Alex, of course, another great alum that we're gonna feature in a podcast coming up. What is your perspective, you know, I kind of asked you about the, I don't wanna call it a rivalry. That's overstating of it, but any issues between AER and JPZ. But within JPZ, historically over 50 years and a theme we've seen in the podcast, there's sometimes a little bit of a butting of heads of music and sports where music says, geez, how many games you wanna cover?
We wanna do more music. And sports says, no, we want the experience to go out and cover all these games. Orangewomen basketball, Orangewomen lacrosse. You're a sports guy as sending to the GM role, how did you see the dynamic from where you sat?
Mike: I tried to do my best in hearing all interested parties out as to how to handle things.
You know, ultimately there's a decision that has to be made so, I don't remember all of the particulars, perhaps about the battles of, well, you know, if this game's airing, what happens to my weekly shift? Or those types of things. And I would have to say that in retrospect, people would probably say that I sided with sports more often than I didn't, because that was my background.
So I remember at that time people feeling like, okay, sports now has more of an advocate in the GM's office than it might have in the past. Because I. Alex Silverman fell somewhere in between because he had started out doing sports stuff and then got more heavily involved in news as he has throughout his tremendous career.
But I tried to be someone who had listened, but ultimately made a decision that I felt like was gonna be best for the station, but it wasn't as though I was going to be "anti-music" because I came from a sports background or entirely "pro-sports" because that was my point of view and I think it was cool.
You know, we did do, at least what I felt were some bigger initiatives during the time that didn't necessarily feature sports. Like I don't know if people would say it was well executed, but the intent was good. We did a competition called Z89's Radio Star, where we encouraged local musicians to submit their music.
We would put it into the rotation and then held an online vote, and ultimately brought the winners into the studio to perform their music live for us. So I tried not to be too preferential to one side or the other, and. I think that's the thing with becoming a leader, is that all of a sudden you're in the position where you're accountable to everybody.
Whereas before, if you were someone who just worked in music or just worked in sports, you would say, oh, well this person never listens to what I wanna say. And all of a sudden when you're feeling the tug of war between those two things, it becomes a little bit more difficult. But knowing that I had friends on, if you will, both sides of the aisle, to borrow a hackneyed phrase from our current day.
You know, I tried to be a good listener and hear all interested constituencies.
JAG: Fair enough. You mentioned the Z89 Radio Star, Mike. What other events or things were you part of in your time at the station that stick out to you as great things the station pulled off or significant events in general?
Mike: I loved what, and Alex I think really helped grow this because everything that I learned, I really learned from him.
He just had a mind for how things should work. Not to mention an innate ability to understand how to fix things on the tower when nobody else had ever come across at our age had come across that type of equipment.
JAG: Something he's continued since graduation, for sure. Yeah.
Mike: Amazing. Right? Him and Tex.
Yeah. I don't know how they got that knowledge, but they're amazing with what they do. Just the ability to go up to the top of day Hall and to be able to look out over, the city of Syracuse was pretty cool. I love what we did with our Friday night football coverage of going around the area, and I remember driving my sophomore year when I was able to get a car on campus.
Driving all the way out to Rome just to phone in 60 second updates on a high school football game and how we'd have an A game and a B game. And we would take two Comrexes out and go to different high schools and be able to, at halftime of one game, go cover another game. Or what we did with, and I don't know what shape it takes now, but Mayfest was allegedly an academic holiday for people to present their ideas, and that kind of stuff, but it just turned into an all day block party on Euclid.
For us to be able to be out there, whether a live DJ outside of our building, because we did ask the Syracuse Police Department if we could go send a DJ to Euclid, and they very quickly denied that request. But being out there with t-shirts and just spreading the awareness of what we are. And there were times where obviously that was very exciting, but also for me, someone who, the reason I got into radio to begin with was because I didn't have cable TV growing up.
JAG: Oh, wow.
Mike: I listened to the radio and to this day, you know, I travel every weekend for work. I could go to a hotel for a three or a four-day work trip, and I won't turn the TV on once. I'm way more podcast and radio centric than I am television to this day. The irony of it being that I work in television, you know, primarily over the last decade.
So there was a little part of me too is, you know, you talk about activation of stuff and getting out into the community. Also realizing that people who were my age, you know, 18, 19 and 2008 and 2009, didn't love radio in the same way that I did. And perhaps it wasn't the same point of cultural pride that it was for generations past at Z89 where radio was a more dominant medium, but still trying to have people understand the excitement of what it was.
You know, I don't remember the year that the show launched. I believe it was during my time there. A show called Orange State, which was covering news in Central New York and covering news around the country. So I thought that was really cool to have more public interest programming, if you will.
And then it was still an era where, and I know this has certainly changed over time, where outsiders had weekend shows or shifts on Z89, and so we still had people who were not necessarily full-time students, but had a legacy show on the station. So just understanding all of the ins and outs of those types of things, not to mention knowing what a legal file is or understanding how to work a budget or all of those things in the station. And then going through getting your expenses approved by the University and fighting all those battles of, you know, we have to submit this form to get people's ID cards in the system so that they can get into the building.
I love doing all of those things because I think they have still carried over from me to this day, and now that I'm just doing one very specific job, but understanding all of the things that go into making a single broadcast run or making an operation run on a day to day basis.
JAG: That's actually a great transition, Mike, into what you did post Z 89.
So you graduate, take me through your career arc from Syracuse to ESPN.
Mike: So while I was in school, I spent two summers interning for a baseball team on Cape Cod. Those are my first two summers. And then my third was very fortunate timing. As I was able to stay in Syracuse, I interned for the then Syracuse Chiefs, which are now the Syracuse Mets. So that was before I graduated. Then I got outta school and for about six weeks I worked at ABC News Radio in Manhattan. I grew up in a suburb called White Plains, so I was able to take the train in. But the day that I started that job, I accepted my first job in professional baseball, uh, postgraduate in Dayton, Ohio, working for a Reds Minor league team out there.
So I was doing broadcasting and media relations and I met my wife out there as well. So that was a great job. And while I was there, in those types of jobs, they're always seasonal. So I knew I was gonna be there from March to September, and then my employment would expire. And so I wanna say it was maybe June or July where two Syracuse connections came through because I saw on Facebook former, WAER, general manager, Joe Lee posted if there were any Syracuse grads looking for a basketball broadcasting position in Burlington, Vermont.
And as it so happens, I was hired by a Syracuse graduate up there.
JAG: Paul Goldman, who also hired me.
Mike: Yes, a wonderful owner of the dying breed of locally owned stations.
JAG: I should jump in here. He has since sold the station. I dunno if you knew that or not, but Paul was a great guy because he was a Syracuse grad.
And he ran Syracuse basketball, and sometimes football. He ran a bunch of Syracuse games in Burlington, Vermont, because you wouldn't think of that as an affiliate of a Syracuse network. But he's a Syracuse grad and he owns the station, so why not?
Mike: Exactly. And what's your, you know, you're competing with maybe Boston Sports and you got Montreal a couple hours up the road. But I think that's another cool aspect of it, of when you have a local station, you can more or less, as long as the audience likes it, do what you want. And to circle back to Z as well, you know, one of the things I love that we were able to do versus say 93Q or Hot 1079, was we weren't necessarily beholden to playlists that came down from a central programmer, and so one of the things that I love to do, and I don't know the way that, because I don't work in music, the way that we got our new music then was via hit discs.
Which was a CD with new music that came out. I would sit there because I got the mail for the station, and I would eventually pass it along to the music director. But sit there and go through all, you know, 12 or 15 tracks on those hit discs and hear the music and we would discuss, you know, what are the songs that we wanna put out there?
Who really cares what the other stations are doing? We have the opportunity because we're not beholden to a profit and loss statement. To be able to play the music that we think other people will like, because we like it. We're the target demographic for this kind of music, so let's be able to do that.
So I love that freedom of it and I miss that a lot to be able to just say, Hey, what do we wanna do? Let's do this cuz we think it's cool versus what's going to make us the most amount of money. So then I flew up on an off day in the baseball season, which are few and far between, to interview for the job, broadcasting for women's basketball for 75 bucks a game in Burlington, Vermont.
I had never been to Burlington before in that interview, so obviously I had never looked for housing there. It was an extremely expensive place to live.
JAG: Yes, I spent seven years there. You are preaching to the choir.
Mike: And I knew I was also only gonna be there for six months. So not ideal for, you know, an apartment to find someone to lease an apartment for six months.
So as it turns out, you know, all of us in our careers have to be beneficiaries of gigantic strokes of luck, and this was just one of the first of many that I was working for the women's basketball. And I applied for this apartment listing on Craigslist. And it just so happened that the previous tenant of that apartment, I shouldn't say apartment of a bedroom in someone else's apartment, was one of the assistants for the women's basketball team who was able to vouch for me to the landlord.
JAG: Oh wow.
Mike: And that's how I got my housing in Burlington, which is also fun story. I did not own a bed at that point, so I got my 20% off coupon from Bed Bath and Beyond. Purchased myself an air mattress. And that was when I slept on for the six months there. And then when I got my next job, I returned the air mattress to Bed Bath and Beyond for a full price refund.
So I made 100% back on something I had only paid 80% of the full price for. A very small win at that point in my life.
JAG: You gotta hustle. And I'd imagine your wife was back in Ohio at that point. She didn't come with you to the one bedroom in Burlington, did she?
Mike: Well, we weren't dating yet at that point.
We wouldn't start dating until my next job, which was my return to the Midwest. And I ended up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with another minor league baseball team in the same division as the one I had worked for in 2011. And so my wife and I, we were just dating. We started dating in 2013. We only lived two and a half hours apart, so it made that a lot more convenient.
And I stayed in Fort Wayne for about two and a half years, as the Minor League voice of the Padres single A team. And while I was there, I started doing freelance basketball broadcasting for ESPN on digital games. So teams in the area, whether it was Notre Dame or Purdue or Indiana, or even up to Wisconsin.
And then they hired me full time in 2014, so that's where I've been ever since. And then, I did primarily and almost exclusively television from 2014 up until this fall. And they called me in July and said, we've got a vacancy on ESPN Radio play by play and wanna know if you'd be interested in switching over to that and doing radio on a more full-time basis.
And I couldn't have been more excited about it. That was really what I loved and why I got into doing it, and what made me really pulled to Z89 and pulled to AER was, on radio, you have the ultimate freedom to create whatever it is you want to create because there is nothing unless you speak it into existence.
JAG: It's the cliché, but you're painting the picture because the visual isn't right there in front of you, like television.
And you have to be a lot more descriptive in radio than tv. Right?
Mike: Yeah. And I'm a huge word nerd, and I love to find different ways to say things and to be able to draw people in. Because when I think back to what got me excited about sports broadcasting was on the radio. You're listening to a baseball.
And more or less, it's three and a half hours of nothing happening. But when something does happen, it's the announcer's job with his or her voice to pull you in and tell you, Hey, the tone of my voice is excited because something is happening! And to be able to do that on my own, I thought was really fun.
So now I have the ability to kind of go back to my roots, if you will of everything that I learned in Syracuse and to be able to apply that trade a little bit better.
JAG: You, talk about the grind and the hustle of getting to where you are now. You talked about the mattress from Bed Bath and Beyond, and 75 Bucks a game in Vermont.
How did you get the gig, but first part-time and then full-time with ESPN? How did you manage to do that?
Mike: Syracuse connections.
JAG: Yeah, I guess I could have guessed that.
Mike: And it's true for every job that I've got. My first summer internship in 2008 after my freshman year was in the Cape Cod Baseball League. And I had no baseball experience.
Thanks a lot Syracuse, for getting rid of your baseball team. However many years ago that was, so, you know, us prospective broadcasters had to go elsewhere to try and find that stuff. So the guy who was the internship, um, he oversaw the broadcast internship portion of the baseball team. He knew that Dan D'Uva, who did not graduate from Syracuse but attended Syracuse and is now the voice of the NHLs Vegas Golden Knights.
Dan had started basically broadcasting in the Cape. He was one of the pioneers of that. So he knew that Syracuse was a broadcasting school. And he goes, well, oh, here's an applicant from Syracuse. Let me just take him because I know that they have a good school. So stroke of luck, number one stroke of luck.
Number two, I get hired to be the pre and post-game host of the Syracuse Chiefs radio broadcast in October of 2009. The season rolls around, it's February of 2010. It's about to. Jason Benetti had hired me. Another Syracuse alum, Class of 2005. And he goes, well, all of my other options as the number two broadcaster have fallen through.
Congratulations. You're now the number two broadcaster. So I was 20 years old and calling AAA baseball. Well in over my head, but still another fabulous experience. Matt Park, now the voice of the Orange, recommended me for the job in Dayton. Joe Lee, Paul Goldman, helped me get to Vermont. And ultimately Bill Roth, who's now, once again, the voice of the Virginia Tech Hokies, and a Syracuse alum whose picture hangs on the wall inside WAER.
JAG: He's legendary. I remember hearing stories about him when I graduated in 2002, of friends at AER going on road trips down there.
Mike: Yeah. Bill is not only a wonderful host to people who visit him in Blacksburg, but has, I think, evolved from mentor to mentor slash friend. Now as we've become colleagues in what we do.
And Bill, I had passed along some of my baseball tape, from Fort Wayne. Because another stroke of Luck, that team happened to carry its games on television. So I was doing 70 games of baseball on tv, having no idea what I was doing. And so I sent it to Bill, because I passed along my tape to pretty much anybody who had an email inbox that was accepting emails.
And Bill said, you know, I've done baseball, but it's been awhile. Let me pass this along to the producer who I worked with at ESPN when I was doing baseball. That gets into the right hands, it gets passed along to a few other people. And then July of 2012, I get an email from the guy who would ultimately hire me and he goes, and we've all gotten this email, right?
Thanks for the tape. We'll let you know if anything comes up. So of course you think, well, that's gonna go into the circular file.
JAG: Oh yeah.
Mike: And I'll never hear from anybody again. And then, November of 2012, I get an email from the same guy and he goes, Hey, interested to know if you'd be able to call this game up at Wisconsin.
So I drove six hours to do the game one way. You know, the final score was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of like 92 to 37. Not a game worth watching unless you're the parent of someone, or a very degenerate gambler in need of help to see if Wisconsin was gonna cover in that game. And that was how I got my foot in the door.
And from there, you know, further strokes of luck. So I do college basketball. They ask me to become their voice of high school basketball, which I did for four years. And then, In the summer of 2014, Joe Davis, who's now the Voice of the World Series on FOX, leaves ESPN to go to Fox. Carter Blackburn, another Syracuse alum, leaves ESPN to go to CBS.
There are a couple openings. I am a known commodity. I get hired and I've been there ever since.
JAG: So what sports have you done and what are you currently doing?
Mike: So I currently do college football, the NFL on radio. College men's basketball, the occasional college women's basketball, NCAA wrestling. I do the championships for that.
We were actually in Detroit last year for that at Little Caesar's Arena, which was really cool, especially because we got very warm weather while we were there in March. A true anomaly. I do college baseball, college softball, major league baseball on the radio, and I'll do some NBA this summer. Or I shouldn't say this summer, this winter on the radio.
And then I've also done Ultimate Frisbee. I've done an emerging sport called World Chase Tag, and in the past I've done volleyball and soccer.
JAG: So it seems that you've subscribed to the theory that's important to never say no to an opportunity.
Mike: You hear it so much growing up, but it's true because even for sports where I've never lied to anyone and said I had done a sport where I hadn't done it before, but there was an instance where I got hired as a freelancer at the Big 10 Network before ESPN hired me and they said, have you done volleyball?
And I said, sure. The reality was I had done one match for Orange All Access, which was like the predecessor to whatever it is now, which was, it was paywalled, and it was a one camera show. And prior to that match, I had never watched volleyball before, so I went to one of the assistant coaches' offices when I was a student, and I sat down and I said, please just tell me the things that I need to say so I don't sound like an idiot calling this match.
And that was how I did that. I did also have a one game stint as a announcer for SU women's Hockey, which was started while I was at school. And we did carry some of the games on Z89. I tried to call one period of it, at the War Memorial in downtown Syracuse. And one period, which is hopefully lost to history because it was certainly not very good, but, I think that's, you know, like what you said is the beauty of it, of when you walk in the door at Z89, all options are on the table for you, whether you wanna do news, whether you wanna do sports or music.
And it's not that you have to choose one. And I think that's the beauty of it, is that I was primarily involved with play by play, but I also did some sports talk show stuff as well. So before you can get on the ear, you've gotta work behind the scenes. So I answered the phones. Danny Perkins weekend show and Danny is now on the air in his hometown in Chicago in afternoon drive.
And another guy who I answered the phones for, we, this started, I wanna say, before I became the GM, but, JJ John Jastremski, who was on WFAN in New York and now hosts a podcast for the Ringer called New York, New York. He did, on Sunday nights, from 11:00 PM to 1:00 AM our first overnight sports talk show.
And they would amazingly, I don't know if it was all his friends from Staten Island, but they got a lot of calls for a show that was on as low as it was on the dial from 11:00 PM to 1:00 AM. And I would answer the phones on that. And so that was a lot of fun. And then hosted a sports talk show with some of my friends, you know, Kevin Brown, Alex Pearlman, are two guys who I'm really still close with today.
And the beauty of it was like the shows that I like the most as a listener now are not dedicated to one particular topic, and so ours was ostensibly a sports talk show, but I think for the first of our two hours, we stole a bit from Boomer and Carton on WFAN. They would do something like the show in review.
And since we were only on once a week, we did the week in review. And we just talked about our lives and then eventually moved on into sports if we hadn't killed the whole two hours. Just BS’ing about stuff.
JAG: There you go. A predecessor to a podcast, if you will.
Mike: Yeah.
JAG: Mike, as we start to wrap up here, any funny stories, whether it was road trips or in the station, stuff that sticks out in your memory of just stuff you, you look back with, you know, lifelong friends you made at JPZ and just laugh.
Mike: Well, there's a perfect one because he was just here visiting. Alex Pearlman was one of my groomsmen in my wedding, and he's one of my colleagues at ESPN now. He was visiting me this past week here in Charlotte, and so you've got the Guardians and the Yankees. They're in their series as we talk right now.
And we were sitting in the back of the old station because I'm sad to say that I was not a student when the building looked the way it does now, which is immaculate. It was more like your very well-worn couch was the way that I would describe the old Z where everything worked, but it wasn't in pristine condition.
JAG: There are alums who are laughing at right now as you member of the class of 2011. When you say the old Z, like, oh no. There are versions that are way older than that.
Mike: That's right. The only old one that I was privileged enough to visit. So we're sitting in the back and I was trying to lay down some voice tracks for some production I was doing and he was watching the Yankees, I would assume in the post-season.
And Brett Gardner is up to the plate and he goes, come on baby, gimme a jack. Two run Jack. While I'm trying to voice track stuff and. I turn around to him and I go, can you shut that F up for two seconds? And that was recorded in my audition session and I did not say F, I said the full word.
Sure. And so that audio still lives somewhere in some of our files because one of the things that we did was, and I don't know who started this, but we started a greatest hits file on the station hard drive. Any time that anybody made a mistake on the air or their voice cracked, or they said something dumb or you know, that could be taken silly out of context.
We would cut that up and save it in our file on there. So it may still live on the hard drive, but I know I've got some of them put my hard drive too.
JAG: That's a great story. We won't ask you for anything that would, uh, sully your reputation working where you are right now. Anything that comes to mind I didn't ask you, Mike?
Mike: Just to go back to what I talked about earlier was, you know, when we get into the real world, you are beholden to a boss who has a certain style or a program director or whatever the case might be. And I think when I look back at my time at the station, it was amazing because I don't even know if we realized you can't realize how good you have it at the time.
This phrase popped into my head perhaps the other day when my back was hurting cuz I sneezed or something. You know, something dumb that happens when you get older. Right? And the phrase youth is wasted on the young, kind of popped into my head. Because you have the freedom between classes or on a day where you didn't have any classes.
To sit in there just messing around in a multi-track session and creating a stupid element that might run for 30 seconds and you might have spent three hours on it. And as an adult, we would look back and say, oh my gosh, that's such wasted time. You could have been doing something so much more productive.
And yet, what is it that all of us are trying to look to do is all we look forward to? Well, I shouldn't say all of us, but a lot of us look forward to the time where we can just do nothing. And that's what that was, was just the ability to be creative with whatever popped into your head with no guardrails other than those laid down by the FCC to have fun and to be able to do it with your friends.
And when I think about it, it might be with rose colored glasses because obviously we were sleep deprived and hungover and all those things that you are in college, but you had the ability to just be silly and be fun. Like now I pay for that privilege because I pay to go to an improv class. I paid to go and be silly where we had the license to do that.
And the ability to make mistakes, not without repercussions, but without fear of someone telling you, hey, you're on a performance plan now at work because you're not meeting the standard and you need those opportunities. And they didn't stop for me after WJPZ because I made those mistakes in Dayton, Ohio.
I made those mistakes in Burlington, Vermont. But you need to have the ability to get those out of your system a little bit, if you will, and understand how to correct them. And also, We were equipped with the skills to go do major market things, whether it's to be able to go host an air shift in a medium sized market right at a school, or whether it's the ability to go set up your Comrex on your own and tape a pregame interview and send it back to the studio, or run it live from site, because those are the things that people are looking for.
So I hate to reduce college to a system for you to get a job in a way that's part of it, but it's so much more than that and it's those lifelong experiences, the lifelong friendships, and that was the most important thing for me because even if I didn't work in broadcasting anymore one day, I would still have those friends and those memories that I got at Z89.
JAG: Mike Couzens of ESPN, General Manager, class of 2011.
Thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure.
Mike: Thanks so much for allowing me to rehash some great memories.