It's like being in sports heaven for
Ross Maghielse. Maghielse is co-owner of Michigan Sports
Radio.com and specializes in streaming high school
sporting events over the Internet. More specifically,
Maghielse is the director of broadcast activities for
eastern Michigan. Handling west Michigan is the other
co-owner, Brock Konkle. It's a statewide operation.
Both are natives of Rockford.
Maghielse is attending
Oakland University in Rochester, 30 miles northwest
of Detroit. “I
worked for the Rockford Independent newspaper when I
was a senior and junior in high school as a stringer
covering high school sports,” Maghielse said. “I
had a column. Brock came up with the idea of starting
Rams.radio.net to broadcast Rockford High School games
online. He contacted me about helping him with this.
I was in school and knew all of the coaches and the ADs.
So we started Rams radio. We did one year of covering
just Rockford sports (2005-06). “We got a very
good reception for the first year and a lot of interest.
We also had some other schools start calling us.
So the 2006-07 school year is when we started
Michigan Sports Radio.com. That's what we expanded to.
We'd cover six to eight games every Friday night during
football and basketball season. We were statewide, but
still mostly in Grand Rapids.” Maghielse then moved
to southeastern Michigan and started covering schools
in that area. “We've had a big presence on the
east side of the state and also Grand Rapids,”
he said. “We have a whole team of broadcasters.
Brock and I are the two coordinators.
Brock picks the
games for west Michigan and Lansing and I pick the
games for Oakland County.” Maghielse
is also a high school sports writer for the Oakland Press
in Pontiac.
“I moved to Auburn Hills and we got a bigger presence
so we can do schools like Detroit Country Day, Lake Orion
and a lot of local county schools. We're closely affiliated
with Mlive.com,”
Maghielse said. “The Oakland Press publishes our
broadcast schedule for Oakland County. We work with them
as well.” They cover both boys and girls basketball
in the winter and some college hockey.
“We do make money off it. I'm still in college,” Maghielse
said, adding that it's not a full-time financial situation
for either co-owner. “It's my only job right
now between that and (part-time writer) with the Oakland
Press.
Brock owns a screen printing business,
which does very well.” Maghielse has been pleased
with the response his website gets from the broadcasts. “We
averaged just over 488 hits per game,” he said. “With
hits, we'd like to think that it's more than 488 listeners.
If you have two people to a computer or a bunch of high
school buddies listening, it's more. We expect we have
more than 500 listeners a game on average. “Football
obviously draws more than a high school basketball game.” Maghielse
pointed to the uniqueness of his operation. “I
think it's unique and as far as I know, no one does anything
quite what we do in Michigan with high school sports,” he
said. “Most sports high school sports broadcasts
whether it be local cable TV or on radio, sometimes
are aired later.
A lot of the broadcasts aren't done
live. It might come on a couple of hours after the
game. Some of the TV broadcasts don't come on until
the following week. “Our games are always live.
They're also archived on our website within a day after
the game. So if you attended a big game and you wanted
to go back and listen to it, just go to our archive
and scroll down and find the game.
You can go to our
site and see from six to eight games. You can bounce
between them.” To
get to the sites, listeners can type in www.michigansportsradio.com. “We
go all the way through the state championships (for football),” Maghielse
said.
“We have a good working relationship with the MHSAA
(Michigan High School Athletic Association). They do
let us do the playoffs all the way to Ford Field (for
the state finals). Broadcasts are in the archives for
two years. “You can still listen to our broadcasts
from our first year,” Maghielse said. “It's
a long list. You have to dig to find it.”
