When North Riverside native Sam Egan was just a toddler, he taught himself how to turn on his family’s television. It wasn’t because he wanted to watch the Saturday morning cartoons — his dad had turned off the TV at the last inning of a heavy loss for the White Sox, but he needed to know how the game ended.
Since then, Egan, 19, said he has known that he loves baseball and that he wanted to be a baseball sportscaster when he grew up. Now, he’s living the dream, so to speak, as the voice of the Burlington Bees, a summer collegiate baseball team from Burlington, Iowa.
This summer, Egan is interning as a sportscaster with the team, traveling with them from game-to-game to call out every pitch, ball, strike or home run and fill the air alongside another caster. Whenever the team gets one of the latter, Egan calls out his catchphrase — “That baby will go!”
Egan first dipped his toes into sports broadcasting as a student at Riverside Brookfield High School. There, he joined RBTV, a student group — part after-school club, part daytime class — focused on learning how to broadcast for television.
In his four years at RB, Egan won three Cristal Pillar awards, including one for best sports program another for best live sports coverage in his senior year. The awards are given out by the Chicago/Midwest chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the same organization that awards college Emmys. He said his peers at RBTV and their instructor, Gary Prokes, who retired last year after 37 years at RB, helped him improve his craft to win those awards.
“My junior year, we had come in second in that category [of best live sporting event], and we had lost within a tenth of a point, according to the judges,” he said. “We just made little adjustments to our graphics and replays, and Gary Prokes helped me out a bunch with that, and it helped really elevate our production.”
After graduating from RB last year, Egan said he began studying sports media at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, as a member of its “immensely competitive” Sports Link concentration, where students learn about video and audio broadcast production for sports through hands-on experience.
In just his freshman year, Egan has had the opportunity to call games over the radio and operate broadcast cameras — for ESPN. While he hasn’t gone in front of ESPN’s cameras quite yet, he said he’s hopeful that’s a checkbox he’ll be able to tick after another year in the program.
Buzz, buzz
Egan’s internship with the Bees came about last fall after the baseball team was one of 20 to 25 that he said he applied to call games for.
“I heard back from probably seven or eight, but the one that stuck out the most to me was the team I’m with now, the Bees,” he said. “I filled out my application probably at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and they emailed me back asking for an interview within two hours of me applying.”
At the time of speaking with the Landmark, Egan said he had called about 15 of the team’s games and had about 30 left in the season. Still, he said he was already loving the job, even the late nights getting back into town after away games.
“We travel, sometimes, on the road, if it’s within a day’s trip, and we’re not staying at a hotel. We’re with the team on the bus, and we’re calling the game for radio, and then taking the bus back and getting back into Burlington at 12:30, 1 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “It really gives you the full baseball field [experience], the full grind of what it’s going to be like for a broadcaster, and I’m just falling in love with it.”
While Egan is in it for the love of the game, calling the hits as they come in isn’t where the job starts. He said he headed out to Burlington about a week and a half before the start of the Bees’ season to start on the prep work — namely, getting to know the 38 college students who make up the team’s 2024 roster as well as the many players on other teams in the Bees’ Prospect League.
“Some of their colleges will give you a bio of information. You just find out a bunch about the guys under ‘college bio information,’ and you have all the stats. Other guys won’t have college stats, won’t have a college bio, so you’ll have to look in their social medias,” he said.
Luckily for Egan, the sportscaster said the Bees don’t play against new teams very often, so he doesn’t have to keep track of new players’ stats at every game. But once he has the stats down, Egan said the hardest part of the job is finding fun facts about the players to share on the air, thought getting the Bees themselves to open up isn’t too difficult.
“We travel with the guys. We talk with them a lot at the ballpark. I mean, these guys are college-aged as well, so we’re all kind of the same age, kind of in the same boat,” he said. “You just talk with them, whether during batting practice or whenever you have an opportunity to talk with them, and they’re usually very open about telling you stuff about them, whether it’s something cool they’ve done in their baseball career or something about their hometown or a relative.”
Now that Egan has been sportscasting for years, he said the pre-game nerves don’t get to him as much anymore as they used to. Instead, he’s more focused on how he can improve his craft, taking the time to review his own calls when he gets the chance.
“It’s just about getting better, for me, every day, just experimenting with new stuff,” he said. “There’s no reason to be nervous if this is an everyday thing. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing, day-in and day-out.”
While Egan is still at the beginning of his career, he said his goal is to make the “big-time” as a sportscaster after completing more internships and graduating from Ball State, where he’ll begin his sophomore year in the fall. In the words of Egan’s own catchphrase, with his passion for baseball and experience calling games for the Bees, all the audience can do is see just how far “That baby will go!”
