By Jeff Kontz, sports editor

Throughout the last several seasons, Athletic Director Joe Zimmerman and Head Football Coach Monty Lewis have received numerous inquiries from athletes’ parents about the lack of a live broadcasted feed of games. As of the 2010 season, Friends University will have an answer for them.

“The Webcasting will be implemented for the 2010-2011 school year,” said Zimmerman. “We did some testing with it a year ago working with the IT department to develop a platform. The key issues that have held up the process are getting a play-by-play person and figuring out travel costs. Hardware wise we are there. You’ll be able to go to www.friendsathletics.com and pick up the feed and listen.”

Football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball and softball will be the sports covered during the first year of the live feed.

Sophomore football player, Jake Theis, is thankful that there will be broadcasting of some sort this fall.

“I’m glad they're finally doing it,” he said. “My grandparents would love to come watch me play but can’t always in bad weather so at least now they will still be able to listen.”

Another Falcon football player, sophomore Jayme Bristow, says that his family and friends in Redwater, Texas would also benefit from the live feed and said that expecting them to make the trip to Kansas every weekend would be crazy.
Many other players and fans feel the same and have been vocal about it.

Coach Lewis has heard his share of complaints and says he doesn’t blame them because of how important he feels a live broadcast is to the program. However, Lewis does recognize the work that Zimmerman is putting into this effort.
“It would be easy to be critical, the largest metropolitan in the KCAC and they haven’t had it, but it’s not as easy as said.”

Zimmerman said it would be virtually impossible to broadcast every Friends sporting event but hopes that fans will still have access through other schools’ online feeds. The only other KCAC schools without a live sports broadcast are the University of Saint Mary and Bethel College. All other schools in the conference have some form of live feed for their athletic events but some are selective about the games they choose to cover.

The cost of equipment to start the broadcasts should be around $2,000 with the only purchases being a laptop, a phone card to stream the feed live, headsets and microphones.

Zimmerman also hopes that the new technology will provide an opportunity to Friends students interested in a future in broadcasting.

“I would be very interested in developing a small crew of students that can get some real practical hands-on experience.”

Zimmerman believes that providing that opportunity to student could potentially serve as a solution to other costs of managing a live feed. Instead of hiring an outside source to broadcast the students would be able to work for class credit possibly and traveling with the university’s teams to events would cut down on travel costs. Nothing is certain now but Zimmerman sees the previous as a best case scenario for next year.

Along with helping current students and fans, Coach Lewis sees it as a great tool for football recruiting and growing the Falcon fan base.

“It’s vital. Anytime Friends University is said on the radio it is priceless. Essential for recruiting.”

Friends has been approached by outside sources in the past about broadcasting games via the radio, but Lewis believes there was never a true heartfelt attempt. He also has a feeling that this new online feed could be potentially better than the radio.

“How many people sit around listening to the radio? But people will spend hours sitting in front of a computer. It could be the golden egg.”