Giving a special Hamilton voice to pro basketball
Meghan McPeak is one of a select few women who have done play-by-play for an NBA game
JUST BEFORE the red light went on and the camera began beaming her face and voice around the world, her colour commentator and longtime veteran of the game did a last-second check.
“He looked over at me and said, ‘Are you good?’ ” Meghan McPeak says. “I said, ‘I’m good.’ ”
And she was. For the next three hours as the Hamilton native became one of the first women ever to call play-by-play of an NBA game, she was more than good. Working for Monumental Sports Network — the Washington-based carrier of teams from the U.S. capital — she called the Wizards’ pre-season win over the Detroit Pistons well enough that when it was done, her phone was jammed with texts and emails.
Still, it wasn’t until a story about her breakthrough landed on the pages of the Washington Post that it really hit home for her.
“That made me realize this is a big deal,” the 31-year-old says.
The list of women who’ve called NBA games is short. Really short. The first came back in 1988 when Leandra Reilly called one.
Since then? Best we can tell, McPeak is standing alone. Hamilton may have produced the best female player in Canada, the coach of this country’s national women’s team and a number of pro players, but this is a new one. Great a story as that is though, how she got here is even better. Because just one thing in her narrative changes and she’s working as an interior designer today rather than smashing ceilings.
No joke.
As a seven-year-old student at Pauline Johnson Elementary School near Lime Ridge Mall, she was unusually tall. Almost five-foot-six. That led a friend to suggest she try out for a Transway basketball team. She made it and fell in love with the game. Eventually she ended up playing at St. Thomas More. But in Grade 11 — and still five-foot-six — she was ready to quit. Transway had just one team for that age group and she’d decided if she didn’t make it, she was done. And?
“I got cut,” she says.
It was only due to the urgings of one of her best friends that she stuck with the sport and tried out for a Blessed Sacrament team. Making it allowed her to be recruited by Fanshawe College and eventually Humber College where she continued to play.
On literally the last day to decide on her program at Humber, she’d whittled down her choices to broadcasting or interior design. Seems the two things that were on the TV at home while she was growing up were HGTV or basketball games, and they’d had an impact. At that last moment, the athletic director who’d become friends with her endearingly told McPeak she never shut up. That should be a hint. Broadcasting it was.
She didn’t have a job after graduation so she started working at Lululemon in Oakville. Fortuitously, alongside a McMaster grad who happened to read an online alumni newsletter that mentioned the campus radio station was looking for someone to do sports. Thought she’d never gone to the school, she went for an interview and got it.
“The universe worked in mysterious ways to have things line up for me,” she says.
That’s only the half of it. She was still only supposed to be doing colour commentary of women’s basketball games until longtime play-by-play voice Dr. Don — Donald Dawson — passed away, forcing her into that seat. It gave her a chance to work on her delivery and refine her calls.
By the fall of 2015, she’d been hired to be the voice of Raptors 905, the farm team of the Raptors, the only woman in that role across the league. Not that long ago she was chatting with someone who had good connections and she made a comment about wanting to eventually get to the States and do play-by-play. She wasn’t subtle or cryptic about it.
“I’ve learned in this business that you have to tell people what you want or they’re not going to know,” she says.
Especially when you’re wanting something that isn’t done. Or hasn’t been done, at least. By September, the offer to go work in Washington came up.
Her main gig down there this season will be calling games for the Capital City GoGo, the Wizards’ farm team. She’ll also be doing some other stuff though, likely including NCAA games. Her goal is to eventually do WNBA games in the summer and NBA games the rest of the year. Because a taste was nice. But it’s not what she really wants.
As for that first sample of the big league, she says she’s not really in position to critique it. Surely she’s watched it? “I haven’t yet,” she says.
Really? OK. How does she think she did? “Looking back, I know I did a good job but I know I could do better,” she says. “I could probably do this for the next 30 or 40 years and I’ll never tell myself I did a perfect game.”
Though that 30- or 40-year idea sounds pretty good.