Stephanie Hofmann/Opinion editor

No matter how far away from campus you are you can still be kept up to date with every home sporting event.

This is the promise of the sports broadcasting program for KSLC. Over the past couple of years this clubs has gone from a couple of guys only doing three sports all year to a staff doing at times four sports a week.

“Pure student dedication and love of doing it,” Assistant Professor of Mass Communications Michael Huntsberger said. “That what gets people on the air and want to continue improving it.”

Huntsberger, the adviser of KSLC, remembers coming into the program four years ago to a ghost of a media program. From there with students’ dedication and love for sports they were able to get not only KSLC off its feet, but the sports broadcasting program. General Manager, senior Jerry Young came in right when the program was changing. He worked with six other guys to bring the broadcast off its feet. They knew they had succeeded when they were covering a playoff football game in 2012, where 1500 people were listening to them.

“At first we were just doing it for fun and then two years later we had 1500 people listening,” Young said. “It was crazy.”

It wasn’t a smooth ride to 1500 listeners, because like any craft it takes awhile to get down. Once each of the students were able to be on the air they were able to correct their mistakes and make the broadcast that much better.

“Developing those habits was a challenge,” Huntsberger said. “You are terrible when you start, but then you get better. We were able to give people many opportunities to get airtime, which helped. They could listen to what they did well and then try to get better.”

The students that made these big changes are almost all graduated now with the final round of students leaving this year. After putting four years into the program it’s hard to not want to listen.

“I will be listening to the next couple of years,” Young said. “I’m curious how they will do without them being able to call me and have them be on their own when something goes wrong. I will defiantly keep listening.”

The sports broadcasting program will have a lot to listen to next year with them doing play-by-plays for a total of nine sports including football, baseball, soccer, volleyball and basketball. With many of the top broadcasters graduating this year, airtime is opening up for the next generation of sports reporters.

“We need to continue to get more people involved,” Huntsberger said. “We are going to lose a couple of people, but then others will see the opportunity and join. It just comes from people that we know that we exist. Just to hear that it continues to grow so we can provide the broadcast, but also improving the quality.”

As students come into the program and make it better, there is one thing that never fails. It’s a group of people that love sports and want to talk about it.

“It just kind of keeps going,” Huntsberger said. “We more that we do it, the more people get into it. The thing that Linfield does that makes it great is it has students that really love sports.”