The Cardinal

Sports Announcers' Revolution

Jeffers Haile
Staff Writer

What do you get when you combine sports and three local talented radio entrepreneurs? Skagitradio.com. It is a website that has a big fan base and continues to spread across the state.
It was started by three guys—Wade Tonkin, Kris Drake, and John Fasso—all local former sports radio talents. They came up with the idea after being dissatisfied with the local radio stations doing a poor job of covering local high school sports.
Wade and his two partners agree, “The local radios only covered a few games during the season, their sound in AM was poor, they hardly covered playoffs, and they never covered girls’ games.” Wade and his partners started in July of last year with their focus on Burlington Edison High School’s football team.
The website followed the team all the way to the semi-finals, all the while reporting play by play at every game that season and streaming it on their website for anyone anywhere to listen to. The website even covered the semi-final game for football, bringing in 400 listeners even though it was the same day as the Apple Cup.
As the year went on they continued to cover Burlington Edison sports, and they followed the boys’ basketball team to state, which got a huge hit of 800 listeners.
Over the course of the next year the website grew immensely. They now cover all Burlington Edison games for all sports, all of Sedro-Woolley games, most of Mount Vernon games and have even started announcing at small schools such as Concrete. On a Friday night in early October they were announcing four different games simultaneously, one of which was as far away as Archbishop Murphy High School in Everett.
The site is completely free, running mainly off of advertisements. On the site people are able to listen to live games. Then the day after they can download the game on iTunes, which is a great feature for players to enjoy because they can listen to their game the next day.
“We want to do the best job we can for the kids,” said Wade Tonkin. The website is even partnered with Skagit Valley Herald, which brings previews for what’s coming up on the website.
No wonder this site is such a huge hit. It is the only place where people can get live coverage and experienced announcers, listen live to every game during the season, and the only site that has boys and girls sports, which normally don’t get the coverage they deserve. So how about Skagit Valley College? When asked about it Wade replied, “If approached we would be happy to do it.” He even went on to say that they would be willing to train local SVC students to announce SVC sports.
The three entrepreneurs are looking to expand all the way to Snohomish county and to the border. And they are always looking for interns to write, broadcast, and graphic design for the website. If you are interested email Wade Tonkin at wade@skagitradio.com.