KCOU covers smaller sports

KCOU covers soccer, volleyball and softball.

By Amber Wade

Published March 18, 2008

While MU’s radio station KCOU/88.1 FM offers students a wide variety of music, they also offer a wide variety of sports.

KCOU General Manager Pat Fleming said KCOU provides broad sports coverage, including sports that don’t receive press elsewhere.

“KCOU is the only station in Columbia that covers soccer and volleyball in the fall and softball in the spring,” Fleming said. “Depending on the sport, we try to cover at least 50 percent of the games on the schedule.”

Fleming said KCOU continues to offer game coverage for these sports because they have received a lot of positive feedback.

“One of the reasons we keep doing it is because there is no other outlet for people to listen to these sports, and families from out of town love to listen to them,” Fleming said.

KCOU Sports Director Kevin Gehl said they started out by covering these sports and then broadened their coverage.

“The smaller sports have really been our bread and butter,” Gehl said. “Initially, it was harder to cover the big sports, and so we got what we could get.

These sports are a lot of fun and it’s a really good service for everyone involved.”

Gehl said KCOU also covers football, men’s and women’s basketball and is looking into covering club hockey.

Gehl said there are many factors that determine which sports get covered.

“I would say a lot of it depends on the availability of the sports and on how many games they play,” Gehl said. “Saturday games are a little easier to cover, but we don’t give any preference to a particular sport.”

Gehl said the sports program has made major improvements in the past few years.

“People are surprised to hear that we’re a student station,” Gehl said. “KCOU has over thirty students that cover sports, which is incredible since a few years ago we only had five or six. We’ve come a long way and we’ve grown.”

Although sports coverage is an important part of KCOU, Gehl said it’s not the only part.

“KCOU is not just ESPN radio,” Gehl said. “We still focus very much on radio and 3/4 of our programming is still music. We want to make sure that everything is balanced.”

Fleming said KCOU has something for everyone.

“There are many unique individuals at Mizzou, and KCOU is a blend of it all,” Fleming said. “People like a wide variety of music, and all the music is picked out by students, so it’s appealing to students.”

Gehl said that KCOU has more freedom than other radio stations.

“KCOU has a lot of freedom to do what we want and to try new things,” Gehl said. “A lot of stations are limited by the corporations and executives that run the radio station, but since we are purely student run, we have the capability to do anything within reason.”

Fleming said KCOU has many events coming up, including a KCOU reunion and the annual Springfest concert.

KCOU Business Director Willie Springer said the reunion will give alumni the opportunity to come back and play music for their former radio station.

“The reunion will include alumni from the ‘50s and the ‘70s, and they will be taking over the radio station on April 5,” Springer said. “A lot of them are still in radio and have been successful in radio.”

Springer said this reunion was originally planned for last semester, but they decided to wait due to special circumstances.

“We had a day set for last semester, but we decided to move it to this semester because of the great football season,” Springer said. “We hope to make it an annual event.”

KCOU and the College Music Committee will also host Springfest on May 3 at The Blue Note.

KCOU Program Director Jordan Stockdale said the concert is a listener appreciation concert.

Stockdale said this year’s concert has more nationally recognized bands then last year.

“KCOU has bigger acts this year as far as nationwide talent, and we also have a bigger budget,” Stockdale said.

Stockdale said the lineup isn’t final, but the bands will be signing contract later this week.