Voice of the Bulldogs on a roll
Derek Wills has called more than 1,000 games in a row, an AHL record
If
you’re following the Hamilton Bulldogs more closely during the National Hockey League lockout, chances are you’ve heard Derek Wills calling the team’s games on the radio.
And if you’ve listened to a Bulldogs road game, you’ve probably heard even more of Wills, who flies solo on the air without a colour commentator for about 30 broadcasts a season.
“It’s pretty action-packed and it takes a lot of focus,” Wills, the Bulldogs’ play-by-play announcer, said in an interview last week.
“It isn’t hard for me to fill that airtime now. It certainly was a lot more difficult earlier in my time here.”
With the NHL lockout, Wills is broadcasting to a more far-flung audience these days, with many of the games of the Canadiens’ farm team — which air on Funny 820 radio in Hamilton — being simulcast on TSN Radio 690 in Montreal.
Now in his 12th season as the “voice of the Hamilton Bulldogs,” Wills has called the second-longest game in American Hockey League history. He’s seen the Bulldogs lose in the Calder Cup final in 2003, when the team was favoured to win, and prevail when it was anything but in 2007, back-stopped by Carey Price, a late-season addition. He’s also had a bird’s-eye view of the development of Canadiens prospects.
The “biggest positive” so far this season, according to Wills, is Brendan Gallagher, the 5-foot-9 winger who leads the Bulldogs in points. He’s not sure Gallagher has had a bad game yet, which is pretty much the biggest compliment you can give a first-year pro, Wills said.
“He is the smallest player on the team, but he plays like he’s the biggest,” Wills said. “And I’ve never seen a guy at this level with his size, outside of maybe (Canadiens forward) David Desharnais, that goes to the net the way he does. Like he’s just fearless on the ice.
“He’s a skilled guy, but he’s got a ton of grit as well. And he has been so much fun to watch.”
A native of Port Colborne, Ont., in the Niagara region, Wills got his start in broadcasting by jumping into the deep end. In Grade 13, he was working behind the scenes at a community television station on a school co-op program when the host of a Junior B hockey game broadcast didn’t show up one night. With no on-air experience “whatsoever,” Wills volunteered to fill in.
By his own admission, he was “absolutely terrible” but said they must have seen something in him because they let him continue doing it and eventually he got some playby-play work.
A few years later, Wills decided he wanted to get into broadcasting as a career. With jobs tough to find, he decided to create one for himself.
Wills went to a local radio station in the Niagara region, bought airtime and tried to sell advertising.
“Basically I created a play-by-play job for myself covering Junior B hockey on the radio,” he said.
He would record the games to work on his technique.
“I’m still my own harshest critic, so I would pick up on things that I was doing well,” Wills said. “And more so on things that I wasn’t doing well and I would try to improve on them. That’s always kind of been the way that I’ve coached myself.”
Wills came up with his signature goal call “and he scorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrres!” during his first year doing the Bulldogs broadcasts in the 2001-02 season. When the team won its first Calder Cup in 2007 against the Hershey Bears, Wills cranked up his crowd microphones for the last 10 seconds and let listeners hear the excitement at Copps Coliseum.
“I think that works well,” he said. “I’ve listened to so many calls from radio and TV guys over the years. Sometimes those last 10 seconds you kind of fumble for words and you don’t want to jump the gun and say the wrong thing. So I thought, who better than to bring us home than the fans? So it all worked out.”
To prepare for games, Wills, who is also the team’s communications director, says he talks to the players and coaches to gather information. He pores over statistics, prepares different work sheets that he can quickly reference on the air and writes scripts.
“He is a very dedicated guy to his craft,” said Al Craig, who does the colour commentary alongside Wills for the Bulldogs home games and some road games. “I mean, it’s unbelievable. He’s a perfectionist.”
With 30-minute pre- and postgame shows, the two were on the air for nearly seven hours during Game 2 of the Calder Cup final in 2003. The Bulldogs beat the Houston Aeros in quadruple overtime in what was then the longest game in AHL history. Wills notes that Bulldogs goalie Ty Conklin stopped 83 of 84 shots in the team’s 2-1 victory.
“It felt like the game was never going to end,” Wills said.
Wills has called more than 1,000 consecutive Bulldogs games and counting, the longest current streak in the AHL. He’s had strep throat a few times, and in his first year on the job had to scramble once to meet up with the team in Cincinnati when Claude Julien, the Bulldogs’ head coach at the time, decided to show him some “tough love.”
The team bus was scheduled to leave Rochester for Cincinnati at 10 a.m. Wills said he was having trouble sending his daily radio report from his hotel room on a dial-up connec- tion. He brought his broadcast gear and luggage down to the bus and went back to his room. But when the report still wouldn’t go through, Wills gave up and went down to the bus, only to see it pulling away.
Although Wills maintains the clock on the funeral home across the street indicated 9:58, it was Julien’s watch that mattered.
“I think he was just trying to teach me a lesson that I should be early for the bus, not on time,” Wills said.
He laughed, recalling how he ended up taking a milk-run bus to Cincinnati, “the longest 12 hours of my life.”
Julien took Wills out for lunch the next day and they’ve become friends since then, Wills said.
Wills’s dream is to be a play-byplay announcer in the NHL. He’s called one game, filling in for Rick Jeanneret, his broadcasting idol, at a Buffalo Sabres game in 2010. He interviewed for an Edmonton Oilers position three summers ago and said he was told two years ago that he was one of the finalists for the job on the Canadiens’ English-language broadcasts on the Team 990, now TSN Radio 690, that ultimately went to play-by-play man John Bartlett.
“I’m still pretty young at 36,” Wills said. “So hopefully I’ll get an opportunity at some point in time. That’s definitely what I’m working toward.”
“I hope he makes it at the highest level,” Wills’s colleague Craig said. “He’s been knocking at the door. He really should be in the big time.”