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This week marks 25 years since Union Broadcasting launched Sports Radio 810 WHB in Kansas City. Sports programming had been airing on a daytime-only station, but on October 1, 1999, it moved over to a 50,000 station. A local ownership group comprised of radio executives, former area athletes and others were the ones who put it all together and a couple of them were charged with running the operation. Chad Boeger would serve as President and handle the programming side and Sandy Cohen would be Vice President and Director of Sales. 25 years later, that is still the case.
Cohen had been the General Sales Manager for 101 The Fox, a classic rock station and the home of the Kansas City Chiefs. He said after leaving the station, Boeger, who had the daytime sports station, contacted him and told him about something that was in the works. Cohen decided he wanted to be involved in running the sales department and also wanted to be involved with the ownership team when he heard about the move they would be making to the new signal.
“I wanted to join and help build something special,” Cohen said.
Cohen said it has been some of the greatest and most challenging times of his life in the 25 years and said, “There have been lots of bumps in the road and pivots and boulders that we’ve had to drive around instead of driving through, because the path we thought that was going to be clear was unclear.”
The station was the lone sports station in the market for five years which became a point of transition when some of their talent left for what they thought were greener pastures. In the end Cohen said the competition, “made us better.” There has been a competitor in the market ever since and just recently the competition flipped to the FM dial.
Union Broadcasting had a celebration this week with their current staff, old teammates, investors, clients, fans and more. When asked about what people talked about that night, Cohen said, “I think all of us appreciate what we went through, but none of us thought we would be looking back 25 years later on everything that we accomplished, with very limited funds in an environment where people in the beginning really didn’t take us seriously.”
These days markets like Kansas City are dominated by the larger radio groups. Cohen said Union Broadcasting’s strategy to compete from the business side has been, “relationship building and problem solving, constantly calling on local businesses and trying to help people sell more of their products or solve a problem and putting programs together that work.”
On the content side he said, “You’ve got to be where everybody wants you to be with the best source of entertainment possible. And now we have a really nice mix of on-air hosts who’ve been with us for 20 to 25 years, but then we also have several people who’ve only been with us less than five years.”
Morning host Steven St. John has been with the station the longest, joining prior to the flip to WHB after previously being a caller to the station and then hosting a weekly boxing show. Afternoon host Soren Petro started at the station in the early 2000’s.
Cohen said his partnership with Boeger has been like a good marriage through the years. “There’s give and take, and you appreciate what their strengths are, and you respect differences, and you keep going. I trust that he knows how to put great content on the air and guide people to be entertaining. And he’s also a great promotions mind. And then, obviously he trusts me to run the business and the sales side, and it’s been great.”
Reflecting back, Cohen said, “25 years ago, and even maybe 15 to 20 years ago, it was a lot simpler world. We thought we were really busy, but we weren’t juggling nearly the number of responsibilities that we have now to solve problems on the business side. But as I look back on it, it’s pretty amazing the overall impact that our locally owned and operated sports media group has made on the city.
“You see it in the way that people respond when they come to your 25-year celebration, or how people respond to contests on social media, or they just send an email to me. So, I guess looking back on everything, there’s definitely a sense of satisfaction. We’ve done a great job providing the best sports content and solving business problems, and I’m proud of that. But at the same time, it’s only as good as our last breathing moment, so we keep looking ahead instead of looking too far back into the past and patting ourselves on the back too hard.”
The other side of things is how the landscape of Kansas City sports has changed since the station hit the airwaves. As Cohen described, “There was basically not much going on from a championship standpoint until the Royals caught fire the back half of their season in ’14 and went all the way to the World Series to lose and then obviously come back and won the next year. And then you get Mahomes in 2018 and then in ’19 we win our first Super Bowl of now three recent Super Bowl wins. So, I tell everyone to really appreciate and enjoy the period that we’re in that basically started in 2014 and here we are 10 years later with all of these pinnacles of sports that we’ve reached in baseball and football and soccer and with Kansas and all three area schools for that matter too. We’re so fortunate to have the sports that we have going on here and each one of us knows that, we’re just trying to enjoy it as much as possible.”
