Old school approach in a modern age: Hudsonbroadcasts.com starts 10th year of Raider football

HUDSON -- Jon Wekkin loves stories. And he tries to channel that love of stories into every game he calls.

Wekkin and his broadcast partner Joe Moore will begin their 10th year of covering Hudson High School football on hudsonbroadcasts.com this Friday, Aug. 23, when the Raiders travel to Onalaska to kick off the 2019 season. For Wekkin, it’s a continuation of a lifelong dream.

“To me, I think a sports broadcaster, in essence, is a storyteller,” he said. “And we craft a narrative story around an athletic event, whether that be a high school football game, a minor league baseball game, a sectional final basketball game, or a girls’ soccer game with 20 people listening. I’ve done all of that.”

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2019 will mark the 18th season for Wekkin calling high school sporting events and 25th year overall. As a kid growing up in Hayward he used to make up his own play-by-play, calling imaginary games into a portable cassette recorder. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a mass communications degree in 1993 he talked his way into a job with the St. Paul Saints the following year and did his first professional radio broadcast with Saints announcer Dave Wright on KLBB-AM.

“I basically bugged them until they hired me,” he said about his first job. “That was the fulfillment of a dream I had as a kid.”

From there he got a radio job in LaCrosse, doing everything from selling advertising to on-air newscasts to sports shows, including calling play-by-play for the La Crosse Bobcats of the old Continental Basketball Association.

“I learned a lot about how not glamorous sports broadcasting can be, with the long car rides and the crowded press boxes and equipment that didn’t work sometimes,” he said. “But I also learned about the persistence that you have to have to be in this business.”

Eventually, Wekkin left the radio business and took a job at Data Recognition Corporation in Woodbury and moved to Hudson in 2001. But three years later his old itch returned.

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“The sports broadcasting bug came back to me in 2004,” he said. “And with the advent of the internet it opened up a whole new avenue that wasn’t there before.”

Wekkin recognized that he could use the internet to broadcast high school sporting events and founded MSBN Sports Network to provide audio broadcasts of Minnesota high school football games on the world wide web.

“I went big right from the start, he said. “We would send out seven or eight crews on a Friday night. Looking back, maybe I should have started out smaller. But it worked,” Wekkin said.

Despite the advent of the internet, there were still plenty of challenges.

“The first year was 2005 and we’re doing games on AOL, dial-up, just audio,” he said. “There was no video. We were just happy if it worked. One of the challenges was technological, but the other was to get people to realize that you could listen to football games on your computer. That was new. There was a whole paradigm shift. So it was just getting people to buy into it.”

He said he knew he was on to something when MSBN topped over 100 listeners for an Eden Prairie-Eastview game late in the 2005 season.

“There was a satisfaction that we kind of broke through a little bit,” he said.

Wekkin continued to build on the concept, moving from football to basketball to hockey, including Minnesota state tournaments.

“I remember the first playoffs we did,” he said. “They didn’t know what to do with us. We weren’t radio, we weren’t TV, and we weren’t print. They didn’t have any web-based thing. So they literally didn’t know what to do with us. We were taking a local communication concept, putting it on new media, and taking it worldwide.”

By then MSBN’s following had grown to over 10,000 for events like the Minnesota State Hockey Tournament. But with the growing popularity came more demands.

“To do that big of a schedule, you have to have the advertising to back it,” he noted. “It’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of hours, a lot of equipment. Then we started incorporating video. Well that’s a whole other element. We did it because the demand was there and the technology started to evolve for us to be able to do it. But eventually we started to phase it down.”

Then in 2010 Wekkin got married and bought a house in Hudson right across the street from Newton Field. And he started to feel the itch again.

“I thought, I’m going to try Hudson football,” he said. “I did two games in 2010. And I did it almost as an experiment to be honest.”

But it worked. So in 2011 he brought in his old MSBN cohort Moore and the pair broadcast all 10 of Hudson’s games during their 6-4 season.

The following year the Raiders had a breakthrough season, winning 11 straight games before suffering their only loss in the state semifinals to eventual Division 1 champion Arrowhead.

“That’s when the program went to the next level,” he said. "And our broadcasts became more popular as the team grew more successful. We had over 10,000 for that game.”

Since then hudsonbroadcasts.com has added boys' and girls' basketball to its schedule, and will start doing Raider volleyball this fall as well at baseball and softball in the spring.

“Our goal is to do six sports,” Wekkin said. “Football and volleyball in the falls, boys’ and girls’ basketball in the winter and baseball and softball in the spring.”

But this year’s football broadcasts will come with a twist. For the first time Wekkin is dedicating the season to someone special. Someone he never actually met -- 1967 Hudson High School graduate, Vietnam veteran and HHS Distinguished Alum Lee Livermore.

Livermore played on back-to-back undefeated Hudson teams in 1965 and 1966, and after serving in Vietnam earned an arts education degree at UW-River Falls before returning to Hudson as a teacher and assistant football coach.

“Lee used to email in all the time with these long emails about the history of Hudson,” Wekkin said. “I always looked forward to a Lee Livermore email. He had to go out to Renton, Wash. to get a bone marrow transplant from his brother because they matched. And with all the things he was going through he said he just lived for those Friday night Hudson football broadcasts. He passed away in April. So I want to dedicate this season to him even though I never got to actually meet him.”

Wekkin said he feels an obligation to pay homage to people like Livermore and the entire Hudson community through his broadcasts.

“I think what draws people into tuning into a sports broadcast is the feeling of being part of that story,” he said. “And one of the reasons we do this is, I think, is broadcasting the community’s high school sports teams makes us part of that community. That’s a role, I guess, where I fit in.”