"The best classroom is a baseball stadium"

From Carilion Clinic Field at Salem Memorial Ballpark on this Friday night. The Salem RidgeYaks are on the air. My name is Braden Schenck, the play-by-play voice of the Salem RidgeYaks. I've always said the best classroom is a baseball stadium and the Boston Red Sox organization, Salem specifically, has been wonderful in partnering with the Virginia Tech School of Communication to let our students call games each and every summer. You learn so much about yourself and learn about your team and learn how to tell stories. There's 120 minor league baseball teams, and there's only one team that uses a current college student, and it's right here in Salem, Virginia. Growing up, I thought I was going to be starting catcher for the New York Mets. I realized that pretty quickly my freshman year of high school that I probably wasn't going to play professionally, but I still wanted to stay around the sport. It was broadcasting that I really fell in love with, so I did that throughout high school. I was lucky enough to come to Virginia Tech and get this opportunity for Bill Roth, Alan Lawrence and to everybody else here in Salem, Virginia. Minor league baseball is a grind. They play 132 games, 66 games at home. You're doing it every day, which helps with the repetition. But it's also, you know, you get to test things every day. And by the time the season is over, you've got 66 new skills under your belt. So in a way, baseball really is the perfect classroom to learn all this stuff. The storytelling aspect to it is big. The fact that games take three hours and I would say two hours of that is dead time. Jacob Mayers has been so good this year. He's allowed just 18 hits this season, over 36 innings of work. Anybody can get out there and tell the listener if it's a ball or a strike, or if the ball is hit the second base or whatnot, but their ability to tell stories and really give a behind the scenes peek at some of these players, that's what a great baseball broadcaster brings to the table. Sports is real live drama. There's no script, and that's where we're teaching our students how to tell that story, how to engage that audience. Telling how we got to this point. What is the score reflecting, what are the big storylines and trends we have seen? So always resetting for the audience because you never know when they're going to tune in. But it's also for me, you know, trying to learn a thing or to teach people about this team and teach people about our players here because I've got this cool opportunity kind of being this public voice here. So definitely using that platform kind of for a lot of good and to teach a lot. Coming to Virginia Tech was one of the great decisions I made in my life. And getting able to meet Bill and the rest of the resources we have in Blacksburg. And they're all so supportive of either giving me great opportunities like this, but also helping me succeed in these opportunities and turn this into a career one day once I leave Salem and graduate Blacksburg.