He is often referred to as the “Mayor of Middle Tennessee Sports,” and for good reason. Brent Dougherty makes sure he is following all of the local teams closely, gauging the pulse of the city and discovering angles that will both inform and entertain an audience. Raised in Nashville, he grew up in an era where there were no professional sports teams in the city.
Yet the area had a sports culture, largely because of fandom towards the University of Tennessee Volunteers football team. Listening to John Ward deliver play-by-play on the radio enthralled and inspired Dougherty.
“I always wanted to be the voice of the Vols,” Dougherty said. “That’s what kind of got me started down the broadcast path.”
Dougherty attended the University of Tennessee as a communications major. What was apparent after he completed radio and TV internships was that radio would allow him to utilize and divulge his creative side. By the end of his time at the university, he knew it was the medium for him.
“I just fell in love with the creative outlet that radio provided that TV just didn’t,” Dougherty said. “Just for my personality type, radio made more sense. That’s the direction I headed and I just wanted to follow that dream.”
Upon his graduation in 1996, Dougherty started his career as a producer of The Sports Scene, a sports talk radio show on WLAC. Despite it being a news talk station, it had had previous success in other formats, helping to popularize the sports talk format in Middle Tennessee with the advent of an afternoon radio show featuring sportscaster Charlie McAlexander and avid fan Rick Baumgartner.
Joining what was a historic radio station was an exciting opportunity for Dougherty to get more professional exposure into the industry and the ability to observe how a broadcast outlet is operated from the inside. Simultaneously though, Dougherty was working at Blockbuster Video since his job at WLAC was for 20 hours per week, doing everything he could to make ends meet.
“I lived with five dudes in a house and just tried to absorb, tried to learn [and] tried to help the best I could,” Dougherty said. “It kind of let me see what the hosts were able to do on a day-in, day-out basis… The vision I had was to one day host a show if I could. I just did anything I could to kind of follow those open doors.”
In 1998, the sports landscape in Nashville changed forever with the addition of both the Nashville Predators and, shortly thereafter, the Tennessee Titans. Suddenly, the city was somewhat revitalized and infused with even more passion towards live sports.
“When the Predators came in, it completely gave downtown life,” Dougherty said. “Nobody would go downtown prior to the Predators, but that brought a lot of business. That brought a lot of restaurants [and] that brought a lot of people. Then the Titans came on top of that and it has just totally transformed what this city is.”
With the berth of professional sports in the city, Dougherty continued to work at WLAC and moved up at the station. By 2004, he was named its sports director. Although he was working in a managerial role, he made sure to continue to find time to go on the air by anchoring shows and reporting on the local sports teams. Moreover, he attained more repetitions on the air working with the Tennessee Radio Network and as a fill-in sports reporter for The House Foundation with Gerry House on The BIG 98 WSIX.
“I love it all and I love the teamwork aspect that radio provides for us to be able to help our clients grow their business,” Dougherty said. “Anybody and everybody in that building has a role in performing those duties, and so I loved, loved, loved working with people with different personality types.”
Dougherty entered the managerial role with previous experience working outside of roles based on the air. He worked as a marketing consultant at both Clear Channel Nashville and Citadel Knoxville, giving him flexibility when it was time to look elsewhere even though he had a non-compete clause.
“I left 1510 knowing that I had done all I could there – and I love those people and I appreciated the opportunity that they gave me – but I was looking for more,” he said. “I did a sports talk show on a news station, and I wanted to go where they were doing nothing but sports so 104.5 The Zone was the goal.”
For the remainder of the noncompete, Dougherty took a brief hiatus from radio. In this span, which happened to coincide with an economic recession, he found himself selling used cars, printers and doing play-by-play for high school football games in Fort Campbell, Kentucky on Oldies 1480 WHVO – anything he could to remain fiscally stable. At the same time, he was making an impact on the lives of others both at home and abroad.
“I did Fort Campbell High School football games and that was really special to me because the kids playing on the field oftentimes had parents that were deployed overseas,” Dougherty recalled. “I would get emails from parents all the time telling me how much they appreciated our broadcast. All I would do was try to tell the story of what was going on; to paint the picture in your head of what was happening on the field.”
In September 2008, Dougherty officially made the move to 104.5 The Zone working as a sports talk radio host. Early in his tenure at the station, he continued to sell used cars as he would host radio shows whenever slots freed up, usually closer to midnight, with Mickey Ryan. Eventually, Dougherty and Ryan started hosting a show together called The Overtime, giving them both air time on a mid-market station.
“You’d wake up [at] 5:00 the next morning, get the kids ready for school, go sell things and then go do it all again,” Dougherty said. “You just kind of have to put your time in, that’s for sure.”
While he was at 1510 WLAC, Dougherty conversed with Duncan Stewart, who he refers to as “the godfather of sports talk radio in Nashville.” Stewart was formerly an afternoon drive host and sports director at The BIG 98 WSIX.
In the end, they came up with an idea for a sports talk radio show which never came to fruition at WLAC. In essence, the show would resemble friends sitting at a sports bar talking about sports and other parts of their lives, akin to the way many alternate game telecasts are seeking to penetrate a new sector of live game commentary.
What followed at 104.5 The Zone was the creation of a unique on-air product with a distinctive sound of friends talking with listeners rather than talking at them.
“Friends don’t always get along. Friends don’t always agree and that’s fine,” Dougherty explained. “If we all agreed with each other about everything, it’d be a boring world. We hope that we’ve set up something where we can all be right and wrong from time to time and give each other crap and have fun with it.”
3HL has had various iterations since its launch in January 2010, initially starting with Dougherty, radio host Clay Travis and four-time NFL Pro Bowl safety Blaine Bishop. Eventually, Mickey Ryan joined the cast, along with sports broadcaster and reporter Dawn Davenport. Dougherty and Davenport remain on the show today and are joined by a third co-host in University of Tennessee basketball standout Ron Slay. Viewing himself as the “point guard” of the program, Dougherty sees a benefit in working with two other personalities rather than one to bring listeners compelling and engaging daily sports talk.
“I’m lobbing things up for Ron Slay to dunk. I’m trying to feed off his energy which is unmatched,” Dougherty said. “….Dawn Davenport is kind of the professional end of things for us. I try to lean on her to make sure we’re not going off the tracks.”
Being tasked with replacing Jim Rome’s nationally-syndicated show on the airwaves, a palpable level of pressure was placed upon Dougherty and his co-hosts. Especially on day one, there was a cognizance that the show concept had to work; it was a risk in trying to take over the afternoon slot from a bonafide national talent and, simultaneously, try to elevate its standing in the marketplace.
“Jim Rome is such a huge presence in this field,” Dougherty explained. “His listeners are so passionate and so loyal. I wondered how long it would take for people to kind of accept us…. We got immediate responses when we went on the air, and everybody seemed to like it. We all just kind of looked at each other after the first day and we were like, ‘I guess we can do this. Let’s go kick ass and have fun.’”
As he prepares for a show, Dougherty takes it upon himself to look at stories and think about which of his co-hosts on the show would be most apt to talk about them, emblematic of his previous role as a producer. His job today is to enhance what Davenport and Slay bring to the program, helping them find talking points of which they can bring strong perspectives and opinions. Similarly, Dougherty’s co-hosts try to position him for success, creating a symbiotic relationship that has helped to establish a working chemistry on the program.
“I love going into the room and just kind of feeding them and then feeding off of them,” Dougherty said. “I think that’s what’s worked well for us. We have such a good thing going right now.”
Despite being the flagship station of the Tennessee Titans and Nashville affiliate for the University of Tennessee Volunteers football team, Dougherty has not felt limited in terms of offering criticism. In fact during his time working with Program Director Paul Mason and other members of upper management, he has never once been told to refine his opinion, allowing him to share his genuine feelings towards situations surrounding the teams.
“We have complete freedom to go [in] any direction that we want, and I think that’s important in sports talk radio – being able to try new things,” Dougherty said. “It might not work – bits might not work – but try them and see what happens and if they don’t work, can it and try something else.”
104.5 The Zone has experienced success in the ratings, especially since the start of football season for both the Titans and Volunteers. In addition to the traditional Nielsen numbers though, the show also receives digital numbers from its live stream on 104.5 The Zone TV. Launched by digital producer Will Boling, the station’s sports talk shows and original programming are streamed live every day on Facebook, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube.
Additionally, the station makes its content available to consumers on-demand and also produces original podcasts. More people than ever are consuming radio digitally, according to Dougherty, engendering levels of engagement that make phone calls, to a degree, superfluous.
“We use [the] comments as phone calls sometimes as conversation generators to help us do what we do but also to include those guys that maybe can’t listen in the car but are watching at home or watching at work and have their headphones in to make them feel like they’re a part of what’s going on,” Dougherty said. “I think this medium is certainly headed down that direction and I’ve really, really enjoyed watching the growth of Zone TV as a supplement to what we do on the air.”
Derek Futterman is an associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, email Derek@BarrettMedia.com or find him on X @derekfutterman.
