WMUL-FM spent a week in White Sulphur Springs, WV covering the PGA Tour’s Greenbrier Classic. Below is an article by Paul Sebert for The Herald-Dispatch about the station’s coverage of the tournament.
Paul Serbert
HUNTINGTON – The staff of WMUL, Marshall University’s student radio station, hit the road last week to cover the Greenbrier Classic, giving students a unique opportunity to cover a major sporting event.
For five days, the station released daily sports packages covering the Pro-Am tournament and the full PGA event.
“We’ve gone down and covered the Pro-Am the last few years,” said Adam Rogers, executive director of WMUL. “We would go down for Wednesday’s Pro-Am and come back the same day. For this year I wanted to do something different. I wanted to go down for the entire week and see what it was like for us to cover it. We talked about it and we decided to go for it.”
Rogers said WMUL staffer Autumn Vallandingham’s father lives near Lewisburg and gave the staff a place to stay for the week.
“It made covering the event much easier,” Rogers said.
This year’s Greenbrier Classic provided no shortage of excitement. Highlights included Tiger Woods attempting to mount a comeback, Robert Streb playing the back nine without a putter, and Danny Lee winning the tournament in a four-man playoff.
“It was a great experience for us to cover the event because we were there with media from all across the state as well as national media covering it as well,” Rogers said. “To be there with local, state and national media was a great opportunity for us because we cover sports here all the time but to cover something that’s on the national stage is a great experience for us.”
Rogers said five students who volunteer with WMUL got to go. They included programming coordinator Braxton Crisp, news director Aundrea Horsley, music director Nathan Thomas, and social media coordinator Autumn Vallandingham.
“We did a little bit of everything from covering the event itself to talking about the classic and all of the rounds,” Rogers said. “Braxton and I did a podcast every day to update people to what was happening in the tournament. We used audio clips from the event and talked to people competing in the Pro-Am.
“We had pictures that Autumn was taking, as well as news packages that Aundrea and Nathan put together,” he added. “We really just tried to do a little bit of everything.”
The event provided the station’s staff the chance to meet with some major names.
“We got to talk to the champion Danny Lee throughout the event. We also got to talk to Tiger Woods and Bubba Watson,” Crisp said. “I would say that perhaps the most fun day was the Pro-Am. The golfers are more relaxed and out there to talk to the amateur golfers out there. You also have a lot of celebrities and coaches from the local schools. We got stand on the course and stand next to the people who were golfing. To get to meet Shaq in particular was a fun day.”
You can listen to all of WMUL’s Greenbrier Classic coverage at: https://soundcloud.com/wmul-fm. For more information on WMUL-FM visit: http://www.marshall.edu/wmul.
Top Photo: Autumn Vallandingham/WMUL WMUL’s Adam Rogers, not pictured, interviews Tiger Woods at the Greenbrier Classic.
Bottom Photo: Autumn Vallandingham/WMUL WMUL’s Adam Rogers, right, interviews Willie Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” at the Wednesday Pro-Am at the Greenbrier Classic on July 1, 2015.
Here’s a playlist of the audio WMUL-FM produced while on location at The Greenbrier: