Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

[edit] Welcome to Mike Walsh's Page!

Mike winning multiple 2007 AP Awards for Sports Broadcasting

[edit] About Me

My name is Mike Walsh and I am a 21 year old junior communications major here at UMASS. I currently live in the Brandywine Apartment Complex but am soon moving to the Townhouses. I grew up in the heart of Boston in a small section called Allston. I was born into a sports loving family. My best subject growing up was math. I attribute my smarts in math to the constant viewing of sporting events. I learned my addition and subtraction by figuring out how many points the teams scored combined, and how many points a team won by. When we hit multiplication tables I could bang out the 7's like no tomorrow. My teachers were always stunned. Why the 7's? Well when no field goals are kicked it is pretty easy. Next came probability and odds. The racetrack solved all of those problems. By age 9 I knew that a 2/5 shot was never a sure thing. I slept through honors math classes all the way through high school. Sports and numbers were my specialty. Everyone thought I was destined to go into business, or maybe sports marketing. As good as I was with numbers, I was better with public speaking. I loved speaking, and I loved sports. I would come to class every day and just talk about what happened in the sports world the previous night. ANy presentation I had to do would revolve around sports. I played sports a lot in high school, but quickly realized I had no future as a professional athlete. I arrived at UMASS in the fall of 2005 and was invited to attend a meeting at the campus radio station WMUA. Suddenly, a new career path arose.

Sports Broadcasting. It was perfect for me. I loved talking about sports, I was not nervous behind a microphone, and I am very familiar with many different sports. For 3 years now I have worked in the sports department at WMUA in Amherst. This past year I was promoted to director of sports operations at the station, a position I will continue with next year. My experiences have been amazing. I have broadcasted a national championship game (UMASS vs Appalachian State 2006 Football) I have broadcasted an NIT championship game from the world's most famous arena, Madison Square Garden in New York City (UMASS vs Ohio State 2008 Basketball). One of the most exciting games I have broadcasted was a 2006 elite eight lacrosse game between UMASS and Hofstra. Umass trailed 10-5 in the 4th quarter and scored 5 straight goals to send the game into overtime tied at 10, before winning in overtime 11-10. This win sent UMASS to their 1st ever final four in men's lacrosse. I have broadcasted a UMASS baseball game from Fenway Park where the pitcher for UMASS took a no hitter into the 9th inning. The list goes on and on. From the Mullins Center to Conte Forum, to the Carrier Dome, all the way up to Madison Square Garden, the sights and sounds I have seen along the way have been nothing short of amazing. With 1 year left I am looking forward to more traveling, seeing more sites and venues in different cities around the country, and most of all more broadcasting. It would be something I would like to do in life, but if it doesn't work out, I will be plenty satisfied with the exciting times I have had with it here at UMASS.

When Broadcasting season is over (AKA: The Summer) I enjoy working for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park as a food vendor. I am now in my 6th year working at Fenway. The job is amazing, yet a lot more goes into vending then people think. Here is a timeline of what my night is like working your typical 7pm game

4:30pm: Leave my house in Allston

4:36pm: Park my car at Fenway Park

4:48pm: Walk through security, show id, check in.

4:55pm: Sit in the stands and watch batting practice and eat a free meal

5:30pm: The list begins, time to pick my product and location for the night.

6:00pm: Now I know what I am selling and where I am selling it, I return to the seats for another 30 minutess of relaxation

6:30pm: Arrive in the vending station, put on my uniform, and get everything ready to go sell (Proper price pin, money to give back as change, napkins etc...)

6:45pm: Begin selling in the stands

9:00pm: Approximately the 6th inning, sell last load of my product and return to vending station to cash out.

9:20pm: Finished cashing out, check to see how much i made on the night, change my clothes, head to local bar.

2:30am: Return home, hopefully with more money than I started the night with.

My summer family. The guys (and girl) I work with at Fenway at our post work hang out, The Baseball Tavern on Boylston Street.

The most intriguing part of the night is picking the product I choose to sell. We get paid commission so you want to sell a product that you feel people are going to want to buy. A major factor in picking your product is the weather. Other minor factors include the time of the game, the day of the game, and the opponent. Weather is self explanatory. You don't want to be selling ice cream in October or Hot Chocolate in July. Time can be a factor as well. If the game is a day game, people want food. They are hungry, need their lunch. If it is an 8:05pm start, odds are they ate dinner in advance and maybe a desert product might be the way to go. Day of the game is important in knowing your crowd. A Tuesday night game probably means adults, go with peanuts and cracker jacks. A Saturday night game might mean a lot more youngsters in which case Cotton Candy and Popcorn might do better. The opponent is important in knowing the value of the ticket. With the red sox selling out every game, some games bring more generous tippers than others. Games vs the Yankees expect to see rich folks willing to routinely utter the words, "keep the change." A meaningless September game vs Tampa Bay will find you people who were given tickets who brought enough money to the game to pay the T ride home. As you can see, so much goes into picking the product. The order in which people pick their products is based on seniority, how many years you have been working there. The final aspect that goes into picking your product is location. There are 4 vending stations. Left field, Home plate, Right field, and Bleachers. For the most part Home plate is the best area to sell because it is the most expensive seats thus the people are more likely to buy and tip. I say for the most part because there are some circumstances where home may not be the best place. For example, a 94 degree day game with the sun shinning high in the sky. Water out of the bleachers is your best bet. While the crowd behind home plate is hot too...the sun is beating down on the people in the bleachers and you cannot sell the water fast enough.

A question I always get from people is do you ever get a chance to watch the game? The answer is yes and no. I could stand out in the aisles and watch every pitch, but my sales would suffer. Instead I work my @$$ off for 6 innings and then relax and usually watch the final 3 from a local bar/restaurant. Attending every home game allows me to save money otherwise being spent on red sox tickets, and allow me to travel during off weeks and go relax and watch the sox at a road game. Here are some places I have seen the sox play....

Tropicana Field home of the Tampa Bay Rays

Rogers Centre home of the Toronto Blue Jays

Yankee Stadium home of the New York Yankees

And then one of the greatest experiences of my life....

Witnessing the Boston Red Sox win the 2007 World Series at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado!

Even getting an opportunity to Broadcast the WORLD SERIES!!

[edit] The lengths I go to....

People who know me find it amazing the lengths I go to to make sure I don't miss a single game. Here it is 19 home games into the season and I have yet to miss a single home game while being a full time student at a University over 100 miles away. How do I do it? It all starts long before the season even arrives...

November 18, 2007. Just a mere weeks after the Red Sox won their 2nd World Series in 4 years, it comes time for me to pick my classes. Picking classes is a norm every college student has to be accustomed to doing. Some students pick classes they enjoy taking, others go for easy classes. Then you always have the typical college student refusing to take any class that starts in the AM, and of course those refusing to take any Friday classes. Much like vending, picking classes is a science, so much goes into such a simple process. Scratch every scenario you can think of when I sit down to pick my classes. The one and only thing that matters to me is the Red Sox schedule. As I sat in my bed on that cold November morning, I stared at the red and white squares that make up April and May and noticed the sox did not have any Monday home games during the spring semester. To spire I went searching for Monday classes. 4 classes making up 8 hours of my Monday later, I was all set and ready for the season to begin. Only problem, I had 4 classes making up 8 hours of my Monday.

January 28th, 2008. First Monday (first day overall as well) of the semester. My first 2 classes were both 100 level math classes ( :) see above). A nice easy start to my long day. Then I entered my Communications 352 - Group Dynamics - class. Oh boy where do I begin....

[edit] Communications 352 - Group Dynamics!

I remember walking into class the first day thinking the class met once a week for 50 minutes and was worth 3 credits. Insane, yes I know, but if you saw the way the timing was structured on Spire you wouldn't think so. Once I found out the class was 3 hours long I debated getting up and leaving. For starters, most 3 credit classes are equivalent to 2.5 hours of class per week, not 3. With that said I decided to give the class a shot. We got no syllabus on the first day, and we were sent down to an abandoned class room with an assignment on the board. Was the assignment there for us? Was it there for a previous class and was just left there? None of us had any idea. The assignment said to list all the groups we belong to. Being college students we could put 2 and 2 together that the name of the class is group dynamics, so odds are the assignment is for us. But do we list these groups individually in notebooks? Do we write them down on the board? Do we do this as a group? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?! It turned out the correct way we were supposed to do it was....well....however we wanted to do it. The name of the class was Group Dynamics, and the class was a strict use of the wording. Day 1 was a sea of confusion for us students, but it was a preview of what the structure of this class was going to be like.

A couple of classes went by and we learned what the semester long project was. We realized a huge part of the grading system would be giving feedback to our peers. Feedback The feedback process was a lot tougher than we thought. We originally just gave everyone positive feedback and kept everyone happy. But as the work load got larger and the dependency on others grew, the feedback began to generate more honest opinions about everyones work.

Individual thoughts and opinions are essential to understanding members of a group. Our group created anonymous Weblogs where we completed homework assignments, responded to our professors pieces, and also used as our personal journals. We used this effective technological advance to check out each others views and opinions on in class related materials. This helped the group as a whole to let us see, in words, what everyones reaction was to what was said in class fishbowls.

The classes rolled on and we began to get down to business on the semester long project. The project was to design a wiki page. Thats it. No instructions on how we would go about it, what we would put on it, and who would be responsible for what. Group work amongst 30 college strangers was going to be tested at a high level. In the weeks leading up to the actual project work, we had multiple fishbowl discussions of what would actually go on the wiki page. There were days of frustration, arguing, and stubbornness. In a way it was amazing how much interest the class took in doing a great job on the project, as opposed to just trying to do enough work to get a good grade. The class came up with a decision to compile a wiki page on a guide to UMASS. All the different aspects about the University and the surrounding area to help students and members of the community become more affiliated with their surroundings. We broke off into groups of what our specialties/interests were. This is what the class came up with for topics:

As you can see, and probably easily understand, I opted to be apart of the sports team. The team was made up of myself, Matt Westgate, and Aaron Smith. We immediately began focusing on what aspects of UMASS sports we wanted to bring to the wiki. Our subgroup worked extremely well together. We pulled our weight in the group, and we all had something unique to bring to the table. Aaron is a relief pitcher on the UMASS baseball team and provided insight to the daily life of a UMASS student-athlete and also provided information on all of the UMASS varsity athletics and venues in the Varsity Sports Page

Matt Westgate has played more Intramural Sports than probably anyone who has ever stepped foot onto the UMASS campus. Between him, and his close friends, they know the insides and out to everything involved with Intramurals from where to sign up, how to form/join a team, to the actual playing on the field. You can find out all the information you need to know about UMASS Intramurals courtesy of Matt Westgate on the UMASS Intramural Sports Page

Then it was my turn. Probably the least known aspect of sports on the UMASS campus is what I do, sports broadcasting. I have been broadcasting sports at UMASS since the fall of 2005. I personally think this aspect of the sports site will be the most useful for students interested in broadcasting because there isn't a lot of information around campus about what I do. To see everything from the amount of games we broadcast, how to get involved, and what its like broadcasting a live college sporting event, check out the UMASS Sports Broadcasting Page

[edit] Class in Review

The original Descriptionof what our class was all about.

To answer this question for myself would be wrong. Maybe some people didn't contribute as much as others. The group as a whole has to receive a 4. We worked together for close to 4 months to complete a project that looked doomed at many different check points.

On a personal note, I took a lot out of this class. Not only the ability to go back to Boston on Tuesdays for the week to work the Red Sox games, but the significance and importance of learning how to work within the confines of a large group. I was one of the people who would leave class in February and March knowing everything was going to work out and the class would be great. The class took a turning point for me when, after a solid 3 weeks of what seemed to be group consensus, a few members of the class spoke up negatively about the wiki idea. My main reasoning of frustration was, where was this 3 weeks ago? What took you so long to speak up? I got frustrated in the fish bowl on that day for the only time during the course of the class. As we moved into April, I felt we were moving too slow. With no class on Patriots day, I thought there was no chance of us finishing the wiki. I will admit, I was wrong. Once we got to the lab in week 12 with the focus to just work on the wiki we went full force on the task at hand. We created a very successful Product that gave the class an overall feeling of satisfaction. Its not often you really get a sense of accomplishment in a classroom setting. You look at a syllabus, you do what you have to do to get a good grade, and you move on with your life.

Comm 352 Group Dynamics will be a class I remember signing up for because I thought it met once a week for less than an hour. It will be a class I remember doing more work in than any other class I took during the Spring 2008 semester. It will be a class I will remember for the 'anything goes' mentality where there were no guidelines for anything. We, the students, pretty much guided the class. It's a class I will remember for the friends I made due to all the human interaction we had.

Most importantly it will be a class I will never forget.