Tim Peeler: A look back at NC State's radio broadcast teams as Matt Chazanow prepares for debut

By Tim Peeler

Matt Chazanow admits he gets a little “nervy and emotional” every time he begins talking into a microphone to announce a football or basketball game.

“That’s never been more true than for this first one [Thursday night],” said the new voice of Wolfpack football and men’s basketball. “I hope to do great by Pack fans.”

Here’s an introduction to Chazanow, whose first career broadcast was as the play-by-play announcer for the High Point women’s basketball team in a game against NC State and head coach Kay Yow. The New Jersey native and Syracuse graduate has roots in North Carolina, but spent the last seven seasons as the voice of Washington State athletics.

What’s interesting is that Chazanow will make his debut in a football game in Thursday night’s season opener against Western Carolina, just as recently retired play-by-play announcer Gary Hahn did on Sept. 1, 1990, in his first game as the fourth “Voice of the Wolfpack.” Chazanow will also have many of the same familiar faces in the fourth-level broadcasting booth at TowneBank Center and on the field at Carter-Finley Stadium.

Hahn’s first crew included Garry Dornburg as his color commentator, Howard Baum as his statistician, Francis Combs as his spotter, former Wolfpack quarterback and All-America punter Johnny Evans on the sidelines and Rob Deakin as the engineer.

Hahn called the Pack’s 67-0 win, a game in which the Catamounts failed to record a first down, the last time that has happened in an NCAA Division I football game. The season ended with head coach Dick Sheridan and his team winning the All-American Bowl in Birmingham, Alabama, and ending the playing career of Southern Mississippi star Brett Favre.

Chazanow’s crew will include Baum and Combs in their same roles, with Evans in the booth as an expert analyst and longtime color commentator Tony Haynes on the sidelines. David Modlin will serve as the engineer, as he has done for nearly two decades.

“I think the continuity speaks for how great a place this is to be and to work,” Chazanow said.

Chazanow was hired over the summer to replace Hahn, who was the play-by-play announcer for a record 34 seasons for football, basketball and sometimes baseball. Hahn announced last fall that he would retire at the end of the men’s basketball season, something that was continually delayed when Kevin Keatts and the Wolfpack men’s team won the ACC tournament with five unlikely wins in Washington and then advanced to the Final Four.

Since then, Hahn has gotten married and settled into a retirement routine.

For Chazanow, stepping into the role as “Voice of the Wolfpack” and the newly created title director of broadcasting adds to a short list of professional radio announcers who have been familiar with Wolfpack fans across the state for more than 60 years.

There were college athletics broadcasts in North Carolina as early as the 1930s, particularly on the old Tobacco Radio Network, which carried games of North Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest and NC State on a rotating basis. The network was not affiliated with any specific school.

Sometimes different stations in the area, such as WPTF, WRDU and WDNC, would broadcast the same game. That changed in February 1961, when a basketball game between Clemson and the Wolfpack was not aired by any station in Raleigh. As he often did, NC State sports information director Frank Weedon thought the Wolfpack was getting the short end of coverage in the local media. He and student newspaper sports editor Jay Brame organized NC State fraternities to flood Raleigh radio station WPTF-AM 680 with calls asking for broadcasts of basketball games.

Soon after, WPTF became NC State’s flagship station, and Weedon was traveling across the state lining up stations for the area’s first radio network. A small network of just three stations broadcast the 1961 football season.

“We weren’t in it for the money,” Weedon once said. “What we wanted was exposure.”

Weedon replaced frequent announcers C.A. Dillon and Jim Reid with familiar local radio voices Bill Jackson as the play-by-play man and Wally Ausley as the color commentator. Their first football game was at Wyoming on Sept. 23, 1961, when State head coach Earle Edwards started that year with three consecutive road games.

Jackson retired in 1974 and was replaced for the 1973-74 basketball season by Reese Edwards. A nationwide search for a new football announcer again led the athletics department to the backdoor of Raleigh flagship station WPTF-AM, where Indiana-born Garry Dornburg had been broadcasting since before he enrolled at NC State in 1967.

Dornburg became the color commentator, while Ausley switched to play-by-play. When Ausley retired in 1990, he was replaced by Hahn, who became the longest serving “Voice of the Wolfpack” in network history, retiring after 34 years following the men’s basketball appearance in the Final Four.

Haynes — another NC State graduate (1984) who has been doing color commentary for football, basketball and baseball since 1998 — now becomes the ranking member of the broadcast crew, though statistician Baum has been part of the team since 1967.

The radio network has evolved to a mass marketing and broadcasting enterprise since its inception in 1961. While initially a joint partnership between the athletics department and WPTF, the network was taken over by Capitol Broadcasting Company’s Capitol Sports Network in 1983. In 1996, the network was taken over by Wolfpack Sports Marketing, a division of Capitol Broadcasting and a separate entity from the athletics department.

In 2007, the network moved to a new flagship station, WRAL-FM 101.5, in order to increase its coverage area, ending one of the longest associations between any college and its flagship station. In 2012, Learfield Sports signed a 10-year multimedia rights agreement to form Wolfpack Sports Properties, which is responsible for a variety of marketing efforts, including radio and television broadcasts, coaches radio and television shows, in-stadium signage, corporate partnerships, website sponsorship and event marketing.

Its regional network of radio stations and virtual productions remains one of the strongest college broadcasting networks in the country.

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at [email protected].