MVC
Ken Kujawa and Joe Aull wait for their cue from Chaz Maddi as a crew of students and staff get set for another broadcast on a chilly November day at Gregg-Mitchell Field inside Volney C. Ashford Stadium. Hours of preparation, hundreds of feet of cable, thousands of dollars in equipment, seven crew members and a lot of internet bandwidth make it possible for today’s broadcast to reach people around the world. The Viking Sports Network has become a full broadcast production, featuring HD quality video, instant replay, in-game graphics, on-the-field cameras and nearly everything else people have become accustomed to when watching live sporting events. While the broadcasts have become the envy of schools across the Heart of America Athletic Conference, Viking Sports Network came from humble beginnings.
The Viking Sports Network as we know it today started prior to the fall of 2008 when President Dr. Bonnie Humphrey had the idea to create a better platform for broadcasting Missouri Valley athletic contests. Up until then, the College had been partnering with Marshall’s radio station, KMMO, on broadcasts. The radio station took care of broadcasts, but unless you lived within the station’s broadcast area, listening to the games was tough to do. That started to change in 2008 when Dr. Humphrey asked long-time radio announcer Ken Kujawa to come to MVC to start the sports network. “This was the President’s idea, and she came up with the name, Viking Sports Network,” said Kujawa. “The first year it was just Tom Sandwith and I doing radio broadcasts for football, but it was
12 Viking Views | Winter/Spring 2019
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