New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
A dream job
AN AVID SPORTS FAN, UCONN SPORTS ANNOUNCER JOHN TUITE HAD A FRONT-ROW SEAT FOR SOME MEMORABLE MOMENTS OF THE PAST FEW DECADES
John Tuite started doing University of Connecticut basketball game playby-play calls when he was a kid in Storrs. He recorded the UConn band performing the national anthem on his new tape recorder — “to make it more realistic” — and then started calling mock games as he tossed a basketball into a baby carriage
Today, Tuite is the play-by-play announcer for the UConn men’s soccer team on the university’s radio station, WHUS, since 1982. He’s also the public address announcer for all UConn men’s and women’s basketball games and football, ice hockey and softball. Tuite has covered thousands of UConn games, in both a PA and play-by-play capacity, and was the PA announcer for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun for a decade.
“There’s probably not a sport I haven’t done,” he says. “Field hockey, women’s lacrosse — I’ve even done track meets on a fill-in basis. It’s a pretty good side job for a rabid sports fan.”
In some ways, Tuite, 65 and still a Storrs resident, lives his life behind a microphone. When he’s not working a game — some weekends, he announces two a day — he’s the morning news director on WILI 1400 AM in Willimantic where he hosts a show called “The Vinyl Frontier” weekdays at 11 a.m. The show can also be heard on 95.3 FM.
“They go hand in glove,” Tuite says of his day and evening/weekend jobs. “You have to work quickly under deadline with accuracy. They’re maybe cousins to each other.”
Unlike chatty sports commentators, good PA announcers, Tuite says, follow the less-is-more theory. In broadcasting a game, “you have to name everyone on the radio who touches the ball. For the PA, your job is to A) be prompt and accurate with all the information but also try to provide a better experience for the fans,” he says. “You’re less a reporter and more of an enabler for fans to follow the game with ease. I just have to get who committed the foul or made the basket, to do the job correctly in public address. I do the main plays, not the play-by-play. The more concise and brief I can be is a plus in public address.
“There’s no cheering in the press box,” Tuite says, “but there is room for enthusiasm from the PA announcer. It’s similar to a ref. As an umpire, the best thing you can do is be unnoticed and blend into the game.”
To prepare, Tuite gets the team rosters in advance — in late summer he’s studying the upcoming basketball teams — and gets to the stadium an hour before the game to review team-member name pronunciations and any last-minute changes. Names, Tuite says, can be “one of the largest hurdles, especially in soccer where you can be dealing with six or seven nationalities.” Having the proper pronunciation and correct starting lineups is, he says, “one of those spotlight moments where you can’t get anything wrong.”
As a decadeslong UConn sports announcer, Tuite has been a sideline
participant for many UConn’ historic moments. He ticks off a few: the 1999 game when UConn women’s basketball forward Swin Cash took a rebound from a foul shot and put it in the wrong basket; the 2013 men’s game against the University of Florida when Shabazz Napier hit a buzzer-beater to give UConn the win; the Kemba Walker buzzer-beater against Pitt in 2011 to give UConn the win in the Big East Tournament quarterfinals; and the “whole 1990 Dream Team, which was a magic carpet for all UConn fans and the start of Husky Mania.”
While Tuite says he has a “place in my heart” for all the sports he announces, basketball will always have a sweet spot. “Who knew we’d be talking about national championships when it was a little Yankee Conference when I was growing up? Plus the enthusiasm of the crowd in the game is probably the best in basketball.”
It is, he admits, a dream job, and one which he has no plans to leave anytime soon. “I’d be following it anyway. I might as well sit in the front row and immerse myself in it all the way,” he says. “It’s like riding the horse — you get to feel the pulse and ups and downs of the games yourself. Everything from the excitement everyone remembers to the dull parts, even people leaving for exits — it’s all part of it.”