John Wallace is among Madison Square Garden Network's longest tenured broadcasters, commentating for the New York Knicks alongside Bill Pidto, Mike Breen, Walt "Clyde" Frazier and the MSG sports team for 15 years. John is also an all-time Syracuse basketball great, having led the Orange on a magical run to the 1996 National Championship game against Rick Pitino's Kentucky Wildcats, before being selected 18th overall in the NBA Draft by the Knicks. I recruited John to partner with us at SportsCastr. Together, John and I developed "Power Forward w/ John Wallace," a video podcast that featured conversations between John and a fellow Orange luminaries, among them Lawrence Moten (Memphis Grizzlies, Washington Wizards), Rob Konrad (Miami Dolphins), and Etan Thomas (Washington Wizards, touted activist & poet).
I booked, wrote, produced, and marketed each episode.
To centralize all of The Basketball League's content, I built TBL News, which included a digital publication where a team of writers, including me, contributed articles; a regular email digest; Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter accounts; and a video & audio podcast called TBL News: The Pod.
The podcast featured conversations with players, coaches, broadcasters and among TBL News writers. The several hundred TBL News articles, 41 podcast episodes, and consistent social media posts combined with a dogged series of email marketing campaigns that drove subscriptions of TBLTV, the league's proprietary paid live streaming platform.
As Head of Partnerships with PANDA Interactive, I had the privilege of working alongside USA Today's flagship combat sports content vehicle, MMA Junkie and their headliners, Gorgeous George and Goze. Throughout our seven year content partnership - which continues to this day - the senior editorial team at USA Today Sports Media Group, the producers at MMA Junkie, and we at PANDA Interactive have collaborated on interactive live streams we call "watch-alongs" during major UFC events. The "watch-along" regularly attract upwards of 200,000 live views, generating significant real-time engagement for USA Today readers and effectively marketing USA Today's online sports book (OSB) partner to a targeted and engaged audience.
Play By Play is the largest educational program in the United States for young people who aspire to be the next great sports broadcaster. We at PANDA Interactive developed a live streaming video platform for sports fans called SportsCastr, and to market it, we partnered with Play By Play and used SportsCastr to power an educational program that involved campers building their own video podcasts. I ran the program. Traveling to PBP camps all around the country to teach campers about digital marketing, sports journalism, and live streaming; collaborating with the camp's directors and with hundreds of campers to develop high quality sports programming; and educating - and often learning from - enthusiastic young people not only produced thousands of hours of content, but made work downright fun.
What's more, a number of the campers with whom I worked have become friends, age differences notwithstanding, and several even worked with me at TBL News. And, those lucky three campers who got to interview Bob Costas as part of a contest I put together, have a lifelong memory and resume entry.
With a decade of experience developing, marketing, producing, scripting, and collaborating on podcasts, I figured it was high time to create my own. Being a lifelong, die-hard Buffalo Bills fan - perhaps the only one to have been born and raised in New York City - a host The Bills, Bills, Bills Pod to provide my perspective on a news in and around one of the NFL's most lovable and storied franchises. There are myriad Bills-centric podcasts. Bills, Bills, Bills offers Bills Mafia a program that integrates news and statistics with dramatic storytelling, high production value, and a spirited positivity that distinguishes it from other Bills podcasts.
From a field of thousands of SportsCastr users, I recruited eight to be a part of what we called the SportsCastr News team. I played the simultaneous role of editor-in-chief, marketer and community manager, coordinating a daily flow of video podcasts, audio podcasts, and written articles that coalesced into a formidable sports newsroom.
