One of the busiest, if not the busiest play-by-play broadcaster in the industry is Kenny Albert. Whether it is calling a NHL national game for Turner Sports, a Knicks game on MSG, a Rangers game on 98.7 ESPN Radio in New York, an NFL game on FOX during the season, or calling hockey during the Winter Olympics, Albert’s voice is one viewers and listeners hear very often.
Albert was a guest on the most recent episode of Drinks With Binks Podcast with Julie Stewart-Binks on the FUBO Sports Network. For him, the key to being able to pull off the crazy schedule he sometimes has is to be organized. However, even he occasionally feels like he’s in different places at the same time:
“Sometimes, I feel like I am in two places at once. Sometimes, it is hard to keep track of what studio you are in, what hotel room number you are supposed to go to, but to me the key is to be organized,” Albert told Binks. “When I have a number of games coming up in different sports, I’ll start preparing early on. I was in a hotel room a couple of weeks ago. I had four folders in front of me. One was for a Turner hockey game, one was for a Knicks game. I had one for men’s hockey and one was for women’s hockey.
“I’ve had some instances in the past in October especially. Four to five years ago, I would have football on the weekends, a couple of hockey games during the week, maybe a basketball game, and baseball playoffs I worked on several occasions for FOX. There were four sports in the span of eight to nine days. To me, those are the most fun times. I do get a lot of work done in airplanes, in hotel rooms, in taxis, in Ubers. It’s actually not as hard as you might think as far as preparing and getting the work done. To me, the key is organization and preparation.”
As for how Albert prepares for a NFL broadcast, he told Stewart-Binks how much time goes into preparing for a broadcast during the season:
“The process to prepare for an NFL game for a broadcaster is probably about 30 or 40 hours throughout the week leading up to that game,” Albert explained. “It starts on Monday morning and it’s a lot of reading, preparing charts, going through statistics and articles. Of course, I’m including the time we spend on Friday and Saturday with the teams. During football season, I always say besides eating, sleeping, and spending time with your family, for those four months, any free moment I feel you spend preparing for that game.
“With football, you might have two teams in Week 16 that you haven’t seen all year and you have to play catch-up because you know the fans of those teams know everything there is to know about the players, the coaches, the season they’ve gone through. You really have to study their entire season… You do take a bit of a collective deep breath when the season comes to an end, even though it’s so much fun and there’s nothing we’d rather be doing. Once that four-month block of time comes to an end, you do feel like you get a little bit of your life back, but again, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
While it can take Albert time to prepare for a NFL game, he said that for him, calling hockey games is comparable to riding a bike:
“It’s so much different than the other sports. In hockey, for example, I’m around the Rangers all the time,” said Albert. “I do work national games but teams play three to four games a week, you go to the morning skates, you watch the prior games. To me, calling hockey is like riding a bike. I can probably wake up in the middle of the night, not even look at the rosters, and do a hockey game if I had to.”
If you want to read more on Albert’s illustrious career, check out the interview that Derek Futterman did with him for Barrett Sports Media in January.
