Lukas Politis attends Iona College, where he is enrolled in the media and strategic communications program. In line with his academic preparations, Lukas Politis is interested in news broadcasting and sports broadcasting.
Sports broadcasting has many facets. At a sporting event, there are play-by-play announcements, sideline reports, and game analyses. These are the results of the evolution of sports broadcasting. Here are some of the “firsts” in US sports broadcasting.
The first sports broadcast took place in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1911 at a football game played by Kansas and Missouri. More than a thousand people in Kansas watched a reproduction of the game. A telegraph wire was installed by Western Union in Columbia, Missouri, where the game was being played. Viewers in Missouri announced what happened after each play, mapped the play on a model football field, and telegraphed it to Lawrence, Kansas.
The first voice broadcast occurred on April 11, 1921, when the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse station KDKA made a live announcement of a 10-round boxing match over the radio. In August of that same year, a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates was broadcast by the Pittsburgh station as it happened. In addition, that October the first college football game, which was played between West Virginia University and the University of Pittsburgh, was broadcast over the radio.
On May 17, 1939, the first televised live sports event happened when NBC broadcast the baseball game between the Columbia Lions and the Princeton Tigers. The first televised college football game was played between Fordham and Waynesburg College in September 1939. These two events, however, were broadcast live in the local markets only because technology at the time could not support a coast-to-coast broadcast.
On September 29, 1951, the first televised sports event broadcast nationwide took place at a college football game between Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Lukas Politis 