When Brock Huard is not analyzing the latest action on the gridiron or starring on Seattle sports talk radio, he can occasionally be found on the green. Following a round of golf among the lush landscape of the Pacific Northwest, he can usually tell whether he was successful without having to look at his score. Huard has developed a similar ability on the radio as he brings his best to Seattle Sports 710 in morning drive and keeps listeners engaged with captivating, insightful discussion. Since he was a signal caller for six years in the NFL, he is accustomed to performing in front of crowds and continues to showcase a competitive spirit on a daily basis.
Although Huard has experience working on national sports media platforms, his radio career has been focused in the Pacific Northwest. With a keen familiarity and avidity for the marketplace, he remains informed on the latest sports news and crafts his genuine opinions for presentation to listeners. Despite seminal industry alterations and elements of uncertainty, Huard and his colleagues have been able to consistently cut through.
“I’d say it’s a pretty intelligent audience,” Huard said. “Remember Colin Cowherd when he preceded us on the air for those first couple of years before I think our management realized, ‘Woah, we’ve got to be local. This market does not like national.’ This market, as isolated as it’s been, and this is really, really before Pete [Carroll] bought a national brand to the Seahawks, it was hyper, hyper local.”
Huard is currently in his third stint hosting with Mike Salk on Seattle Sports 710 as the duo resonates with the local audience. As a top-rated offering in the metropolis, members of the show do not take their positions for granted and recognize their distinctive position on the airwaves. Whether the discussion centers around the Seahawks, Mariners, Kraken or Sounders, there is hardly any shortage of topics and opinion to disseminate.
“Kind of like playing a football game, I know there’s some pertinent stats – touchdowns, interceptions, yards, completions – but you kind of just know what a winning game is and what a winning day is, and I kind of feel the same in radio,” Huard said. “And after so many of these hours together with Mike, you kind of feel like, ‘Wow, we tried to make something out of nothing today,’ or, ‘Wow, that was such a blast, and those three hours, four hours went by in such a hurry.’”
The Bonneville International radio station presents a local programming lineup during weekday prime hours that discusses matters surrounding Seattle-based sports teams and leagues at large. As a whole, the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area ranks 13th among Nielsen designated market areas in the United States, and Huard recognizes the incontrovertible passion and devotion to perdurable pastimes and new frontiers.
“They don’t want the low-hanging bro fruit, right?,” Huard surmised. “They want good, hard, opinionated stuff, they want to learn things [and] they want to be, I think, challenged with our curiosities, and yeah, it’s been a neat market to be a part of.”
Huard strives for transparency with the listeners, sharing his authentic perspectives and recapitulating unique stories and anecdotes. With a discerning and incisive approach, the morning drive program has proved to enthrall listeners spanning multiple demographics. Being transparent and effectively living part of his life on the airwaves is something Huard learned from Dori Monson, a former host in the locale who engaged in storytelling while remaining connected with his audience.
“If you tuned into a week of our shows, I think you would say, ‘Gosh, that doesn’t sound like a lot of other shows,’ or, ‘They tackle some things or go in some directions that is not just surfacey,’” Huard said. “It’s pretty curious, and thankfully Mike is so smart and so witty and such a curious, intelligent guy that it offsets a lot of my just low IQ, former athlete simpleton.”
Sixteen years since the first episode of Brock & Salk, the hosts have built resounding chemistry tangible to listeners. Yet the pairing needed to overcome early difficulties following the launch of the program in 2009 as Huard moved into the sports talk radio format. Leveraging the connective tissue he possessed as a former Seahawks player and through relationships around the game, he immediately brought significant credibility but had to work through early growing pains.
“It was really bad the first year,” Huard said. “I mean, it was really, really bad. Everything was really troubled, the recession hit, ratings were terrible.”
Covering Mariners spring training for Seattle Sports 710 helped bolster the accord between Huard and Salk. Due to being situated on the road, the hosts spent significant time together beyond the show that helped foster a more robust on-air relationship, staying in the same condominium and commuting to the spring training facility.
“It was almost like an NFL training camp where you go away and you just bond, and that week in the desert pretty early on was a real looking back, a real turning point of, ‘We can be on the same page. Let’s be on the same team, and let’s go win,’” Huard recalled, “and fortunately, to see our flagship Seahawks [get] really good with a couple big-time stars and Pete Carroll and Russell Wilson, and we got to ride on the coattails of so much of that excitement.”
Huard credits the management at Bonneville International for being prudent in its approach and operating as a media company instead of a terrestrial radio station. There is alignment in the building with program director Kyle Brown and senior vice president and market manager Cathy Cangiano, along with an overarching belief in the staff. Seattle Sports 710 as a brand continues to move forward, maintaining broadcast partnerships with the Seahawks and Mariners and augmenting its digital presence.
“When Mike was the program director, it was a lot of his vision,” Huard said. “There was a lot of debate about, ‘Wow, do we put our content in the podcast form?,’ and, ‘Well, if we put in podcasts, will they listen to us live?,’ and there [were] some of those friction points, but for Bonneville [International], it was very apparent we’ve got to be ahead of schedule, and I think that that’s given us a big leg up in the competition.”
Before Huard commenced his career in sports media, he was working in real-estate development and watching from afar as the Seahawks made a run to the Super Bowl championship in the 2005 season. Since he played on the team over four of the ensuing six years, he knew personnel and had insights that others did not possess. Huard started to accept certain opportunities in media, including serving effectively as the ad hoc Seahawks insider on The Hot List program at ESPNEWS. Two years later, he joined ESPN on a full-time basis and started to deliver analysis on select college football games.
“It was super opportune timing for me looking back that the Seahawks had that season they did just at the time I was trying to figure out some of what I enjoy doing,” Huard said, “and even if I did enjoy doing it, which I really did, and then fast-forward four years later, our radio station opened up.”
After 12 years working at ESPN, Huard made the move to FOX Sports and started broadcasting college football matchups alongside play-by-play announcer Joe Davis and reporter Bruce Feldman. When the network shifted its announcing teams after a few seasons, he started collaborating with Jason Benetti and Allison Williams, and he continues to work with the trio today. Huard outlined a dichotomy between the two media conglomerates, asserting ESPN is a massive operation similar to the NFL while FOX is more analogous to the NBA.
“It’s not an 80-person NBA team, it’s a 12-person NBA team, right?,” Huard said. “It’s just so much smaller in scale, and so the resources provided to you are just off the charts and they really do care about people, and that’s why you see Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long and Curt Menefee there forever, why you see so many of their personnel loyal to them forever and don’t leave because they get treated like family and treated really, really well.”
As Huard continues to cover professional and collegiate sports, he can extrapolate the effect of media on conferences. After broadcasting some Pac-12 games with FOX Sports over the years, he watched as the Power Five conference did not land a lucrative media rights deal and instead opted for a one-year pact that also included The CW Network. Media consolidation and other shifts taking place around the game, such as NIL deals, the transfer portal and conference realignment, have rendered the adage clear that the only thing constant is change.
“It’s no longer the amateur game that I was a part of,” Huard explained. “These athletes are now getting paid, and that has changed the dynamic, and with that, obviously the networks and what they pay matters to them and the games that they broadcast matter to them.”
Huard is balancing both of his ventures throughout the fall, and while he admits it was too much early on, he benefited from his youth and took weekly red-eye flights with radio equipment to host remotely. Rather than continuing to move at this inexorable pace, he is now prioritizing more of his well being and taking Fridays off from radio to better conserve energy and also take part in meetings and other preparation. In the end, he is preventing himself from feeling enervated and retaining stamina to properly approach the game.
“Radio, through the time and relationships, [has] been accommodating to that,” Huard said, “and as you do get older, I think you also work a little wiser and a little smarter rather than just always, ‘I got to just work every single hour,’ so I think you do learn to work a little bit more wisely.”
While Huard enjoys his work in the present moment, he holds concern about the profitability of radio as the industry deals with volatile advertising and marketing revenue. The viability of the business is something towards which he maintains awareness as companies reallocate funding across different platforms and look to meet their addressable markets. On the contrary, he stays energized because of the relationships he has engendered and his predilection for the craft, something that was recently substantiated amid his workflow.
“I took a call, I walked out of my room and I said to my son and my wife, ‘That’s why I still love doing this,’” Huard said. “All these years later, hours later, it was a late-night call, but it was just getting information that others didn’t have because of relationships that you’ve cultivated and trust that you build.”
As Huard continues to move forward in his media career, he remembers the lessons he has learned along the way from previous experience on the gridiron and behind the microphone. At the same time, he aims to never burn bridges and enrich the consumption experience for fans no matter the medium. Securing victories in these enterprises is hardly a facile task with a panoply of competition and dwindling attention spans, but Huard has demonstrated the ability to connect with the audience and exhibits gratitude towards his occupation.
“The NFL, as a player, was a lot more work for me than the radio and the television have been, and that’s because it got to a point in the NFL that it was not nearly as enjoyable doing that job as it was when I was a kid playing, and this job, on a morning-to-morning basis, every day, I wake up every morning and I enjoy what I do,” Huard said. “I love what I do, and when you can find that in your work, that’s success and a life’s calling.”
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.
