The Starters live their hoop dreams
Ryerson broadcast students take podcast to the big time
Picture your buddies, your sports buddies, and the best version of them. Picture the way they like sports: No trying to one-up each other, no meanspirited jibes, they know what they’re talking about, and they make good jokes. It’s nice, having friends like that.
This week, if you’re a basketball fan in Toronto, your buddies came home. J.E. Skeets and Tas Melas started out like a lot of people: they had day jobs they hated, and they wanted to do something they didn’t. The difference with most people is that these guys did something about it.
“To say we had a vision of everything that would happen,” says Melas, “would be an entire lie.”
Melas and Skeets form the heart of The Starters, along with Trey Kerby (the one with the mammoth beard), and Leigh Ellis (the Australian). They are on NBA TV for a half-hour, five times a week, and they’re back here for the All-Star Game, doing live shows at Real Sports.
And it started here. Ten years ago, Skeets and Melas and their Ryerson buddy Jason (JD) Doyle had graduated from the broadcasting program and were working day jobs — Skeets, whose real name is Philip Elder, was a physician recruiter; Melas was doing transcribing and some blogging for Yardbarker, Doyle working at a sound production place. None of them were happy.
“We had to do something so that we wouldn’t hate our lives as much as we did,” says Melas now. “We were in a box.”
So Skeets, the skinny one, and Melas, the deep-voiced goateed one, started a weekly basketball podcast, which was one of the few of its kind. Soon they were getting emails from around the world; in what was still a digital wilderness, they became a little basketball island, and the loyalty they engendered was fierce.
“The audience was probably hilariously small, but it was really passionate, and I guess at the time that was enough for us to go to twice a week, and then daily, and try to do better and better,” says Skeets.
“They weren’t scripted at all; it didn’t feel forced, or like they had to hit any talking points,” says Kerby. “They were happy to go on diversions about reggae dancing, or whether Jason Maxiell should be an all-star.
“And them chasing down the things that interested them was what was so different, because it’s a lot easier to be passionate about that stuff than the stuff you have to talk about. They were just so inviting of their fans, and including their fans in the show as fans but as ways to get ideas. It was just unique stuff.”
It became a daily podcast, then a daily video podcast. They dipped into savings and lines of credit to get the right equipment. Skeets was writing, and moved up the nascent basketball blog world to Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie. And every day, he and Melas were getting up early and taping a show, putting in reps, getting better. They added Ryerson friend Matt Osten to handle the serious business conversations and he pestered The Score, back when it was a TV station. They were hired.
They did skits, and the skits were funny. Dancing Hedo, with Melas impersonating a partying Hedo Turkoglu, was genius. Like A Bosh was great. They expanded. If you want to know how much loyalty they inspired in the Internet basketball community, ask Kerby about the night they hired him to run the show’s blog. It was after a night at a basketball blog conference in Chicago in 2010, and Kerby and his wife Laura were driving home.
“On the drive home she started crying,” says Kerby. “And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘I don’t want to ruin it, but the guys are going to ask you to come work for them, and it means we might move to Canada.’
“She said, ‘It seems like it’s going to happen, and it’s going to be fun, and I’m excited to move to Toronto.’ She said, ‘I’m just so happy for you.’ ”
They added Ellis after their nine- city, funny-video, No Season Required lockout tour in 2011; he was a producer at the station, and by the end of the trip his wit, knowledge and enthusiasm became indispensable. As The Score was collapsing, Osten got them talking to the NBA. It came together fast, and the whole gang moved to Atlanta, and held a special goodbye live show in Toronto. Until they went to Atlanta, they were The Basketball Jones.
“That was pure joy, but on the other hand, it was really, really scary,” says Skeets. “No one wanted to leave Toronto, that’s for sure. We loved the city, and all our family and friends were there. Will my wife want to move there? JD has kids. I didn’t have a car. I said, I have to buy a car.
“But the show is our life. It was emotional just in the sense that it was scary that we were leaving, and sad that we were leaving friends and family, but that was countered by the fact that ‘oh my god, this is amazing.’ We are going to do a daily television show for NBA TV, in the States. I mean, you know as well as I know — basketball isn’t the biggest sport in Canada.”
“It was a leap and it was a risk,” says Scooter Vertino, the general manager of NBA digital, who has overseen their integration with Turner Sports. “It was a risk on their end, and it was a risk on our end, and there had to be some blind trust. More for them, really.”
Well, they’re back. Melas and Skeets are still the hearts of this, two Toronto kids who looked at the media market and just chose their own path. They’ve always felt a little like the future.
“We always leaned on each other to make sure we were doing our jobs daily, and to make sure that we didn’t falter, and we know that we need each other to get to where we’ve been,” says Melas. “We rely on each other, and try to utilize each other’s strengths, and to get the most out of each other. We need each other.”
They’re still not polished; there’s none of the TV straightjacket, from their clothes to the fact that sometimes they talk over each other. They’re pros, but they don’t use a teleprompter. But that’s the point, because they become your buddies. There’s an earnestness to them; the whole point is that it should be fun.
On Wednesday night they ate poutine on television and got paid for it. Follow your dreams, kids.