Nate Kreckman of Altitude Sports Radio doesn’t follow the formula.
He doesn’t have a former Denver Bronco player as a co-host. He doesn’t even have a former athlete as a co-host.
He doesn’t talk only Broncos. He doesn’t talk only football.
The co-host of Kreckman & Lindahl is proud that his show – and his station, Altitude Sports Radio – are breaking the traditional mold of Denver sports talk radio.
“Our former Program Director Dave Tepper really wanted to do something different, and he really wanted to make his focus about entertainment and putting personality-driven sports radio on the air. You look at our station right now, and that’s what our line-up is,” Kreckman told BSM this week.
Kreckman credited Tepper, who has since moved on from Altitude, for developing a great station brand with a creative vision. And he feels that his show, which airs weekdays from 2-6 PM MST, is continuing to fulfill those initiatives.
“The show that I do right now is two radio guys that are sitting next to each other trying to crack each other up every single afternoon,” he said. “It’s made for my favorite radio show I’ve ever done and I think it’s the most entertaining radio show that I’ve ever been a part of. It’s really cool because it took somebody with some vision and the willingness to be different to create a station that sounds like ours and to create a show that sounds like ours. Working with Andy every single afternoon is an absolute joy…It really is a situation that I couldn’t be more proud of.”
Before conducting my interview with Kreckman, I admittedly had a pre-conceived notion that Denver sports talk radio talked Broncos non-stop and that everything else was kind of irrelevant. But Kreckman made clear that at his station, and on his show, all of Denver’s teams get proper billing.
“We don’t talk about the Broncos exclusively,” he said. “We talk about everything and we talk about teams in their seasons. We talk about off-season news… When the Avalanche were in the Stanley Cup run, we lived and died with it. When Nikola Jokic won back-to-back MVPs, we talked about the Joker all the time. It’s football season now so we’re talking a ton of Broncos at the moment, but I think it’s a disservice to our listeners and to the sports fans in Denver to not talk about everything that is going on, so we try to give that to people.”
While Kreckman and Lindahl have undoubtedly had plenty of non-football news to talk about over the past several months with the Avalanche winning the Stanley Cup, the Nuggets falling short again, and the Rockies losing star Trevor Story in free agency, there are massive football stories that are giving this season a different feel than those before it.
With the Broncos acquiring quarterback Russell Wilson this offseason, Kreckman says he’s noticed an uptick in energy and excitement from his listeners.
“It’s really fun to be talking about a team that we think is going to be able to do some cool stuff, and a team that has been an underachiever in the last couple of years and still has a lot of things to prove,” he said. “There’s a huge buzz to it. Russell Wilson has made the Broncos interesting again…. The Broncos are awesome to talk about right now and it’s not some nonsense of fighting over whether Teddy Bridgewater or Drew Lock should have the right to lead the Broncos to seven victories. We’re talking about an actual, relevant NFL team…. We can’t wait for football season to get going around here.”
The Broncos also have a new ownership group and are in one of the best-projected divisions in NFL history, which also makes them more interesting to talk about than in past years, Kreckman noted. Couple that with the team’s new head coach Nathaniel Hackett and the amount of talent on the roster, and it’s easy to see why he and his listeners are pumped.
But despite the energy and excitement that the Broncos and their fans bring to the show, when the next basketball, hockey, and baseball seasons come around, you can expect Kreckman and Lindahl to make room for them too.
They don’t follow the preconceived notions or the old Denver sports radio formulas.
And Kreckman is proud of it.
Brady Farkas is a sports radio professional with 5+ years of experience as a Program Director, On-Air Personality, Assistant Program Director and Producer in Burlington, VT and Albany, NY. He’s well versed in content creation, developing ideas to generate ratings and revenue, working in a team environment, and improving and growing digital content thru the use of social media, audio/video, and station websites. His primary goal is to host a daily sports talk program for a company/station that is dedicated to serving sports fans. You can find him on Twitter @WDEVRadioBrady and reach him by email at bradyfarkas@gmail.com.
