Varsity Day

Its days like this where I am glad I joined the University Radio Station – Source Radio. Each year around this time, Coventry University and Warwick University take part in "Varsity Day"? where they play each other in a range of sports including Football, Rugby, Cricket, Badminton, Hockey and Swimming. The radio station has never covered such an event so we thought it would be a great idea to get involved.

The idea was to have some people in the studio (Myself and Ben) then various reporters at different sporting events phoning and texting in results as they came available. As I stated something like this hadn’t been tried before and our experience handling people phoning into the station was limited.

Fortunately we pulled it off with great results and the 6 hours we spent on air coordinating the show went great. We had loads of guests in the studio including people from the cricket team, football team, hockey team, badminton team and some cheerleaders. All were mixed into constant phone updates from people covering basketball, swimming and badminton to name a few.

It’s a shame about the weather as a number of events including the Football and Rugby were called off because of bad rain; luckily we still had plenty to talk about on air. For a show that was hardly planned, lacked and sort of structure and was constantly changing it went really well. Mostly thanks to the people helping in the studio and myself and Ben’s constant humour and jokes.

It ended up with Coventry winning in a few sports (causing uproar in the studio) and some very satisfied station members. Hopefully with all the extra exposure we caused today Source Radio will get a few more listeners and the profile of the station will be raised once more.

The 6 hours we spent on air was the longest Ben, Chris and myself had done a show for but it went really quickly. We were especially hyper thanks to energy drinks but I wouldn’t recommend drinking too many.

Photos from the day can be found at:

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/archives/date-posted/2006/03/08/