A Few Minutes With The Hokies' Bill Roth

Hearing “Touchdown Tech” usually means two things for Virginia Tech football fans; the Hokies have just scored, and Bill Roth is behind the microphone calling the game.

 

Virginia Tech’s play-by-play man, Bill Roth, has been named Virginia’s Sportscaster of the Year a record eight times in his career by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association and was recently inducted into the Richmond Hokie Club Hall of Fame.

 

Now in his 22nd year with the Hokies, Roth has called numerous great moments in Virginia Tech sports history. He was kind enough to recently sit down with me and talk about his career and the time he has spent at Virginia Tech.

 

Below is a selection of questions and answers from the interview.

 

 

 

Q:  What inspired you to become a sports broadcaster?

Roth:  Well, I was a poor athlete and enjoyed sports and loved it. I recall being a child, and it was something I always wanted to do, and I figured it would beats working for a living, which it does.

 

Q:  Did you have any role models while you were growing up?

Roth:  Yeah, plenty. People like Vin Scully who did the [Los Angeles] Dodgers and Jack Buck who did the [St. Louis] Cardinals. In Pittsburgh, there were people like Jack Fleming who did the Steelers and West Virginia University and Mike Lange who does the Penguins.

 

Q:  How did it feel to win the 1986 Robert Costas Scholarship and attend Syracuse?

Roth:  Well it was nice. It was quite an honor, as we had a lot of real talented people there. It was a combination of broadcasting and academic achievement, and it helped with some tuition. I should also include Bob [Costas] in [my role models] too. He’s a very articulate and cerebral broadcaster who asks really good questions when he does interviews and really understands the sports that he covers. He spent a lot of time in preparation, whether he was doing a baseball game or hosting the Olympics. He is one of those people that could really understand slugging percentage as well as the best places to eat in Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Clearly he is iconic and one of the greatest ever to do this.

 

Q:  When did the option at Virginia Tech open up and what did you think of it originally?

Roth:  It opened up in 1988, and I was 22 years old and nine months out of college. I had the opportunity to come down here, and having been here with Mike and having seen this campus and community, it reminded me so much of Penn State back then, and I knew we just had a great opportunity here…Even back then you could see that Virginia Tech would be a gold mine, and it could be ultra successful because it had the great academics, the great statewide and region-wide support, and it was a very populous state that was going to grow. That’s exactly what has happened.

 

 

Q:  You’re in your 22nd  year as the play-by-play man for Virginia Tech football and Mike Burnop has been by your side the entire time. How did you all develop the chemistry that you two have and how has that enhanced your experience in calling games?

Roth:  Ever since the first time I met Mike, we have really just gotten along. Our families are very close. We’ve vacationed together, and we’ve had their kids around as they grew up. It’s been really interesting to be so close to someone who is also your on-air partner. It’s made things tremendously easy. We kid and we joke, but what I really appreciate about Mike is that he really works hard as an analyst, studies and does his homework, is fair to the opponent and yet, still is a diehard Hokie and a Hall of Fame athlete here. He is very unique, and he has become a great analyst.

 

Q:  When did you know that you had finally made it and were living a dream?

Roth:  Yeah, I remember my very first game. The very first game Mike and I did was at Clemson, and there were 80,000 people in the stands that day, and Danny Ford was coaching the Tigers and they ran down that hill [to enter the stadium]. It was very unique, and it still is a very unique place to see a game. For me, that being my first game I remember it very vividly. The excitement of being here hasn’t worn off.

 

Q:  What has been the defining moment or call in your career?

Roth:  The athletes make the play, and I have just been really fortunate, whether it’s Shayne Graham, Michael Vick, Tyrod Taylor, Jim Druckenmiller, Jermaine Holmes [for football] or Ace Custis, Carlos Dixon, Bimbo Coles or Wally Lancaster [for basketball], to call great players making great plays. I’m just very fortunate that we the announcers, we the fans and we the listeners have been here at Tech during this unbelievably successful time so that there have been great moments.

 

 

The greatest moments in Tech history are ongoing, and that is what is so really unique about being here at this time. Other schools, whether it’s Michigan, Notre Dame, or USC, had their great moments 50-60 years ago. The legendary coach is here now, the iconic player is here now, and the people who will have statues built of them are on the field and coaching here now. In 50 years they will talk about the things that we are living through now.

 

Obviously it’s been exciting. Jermaine [Holmes’] catch [versus UVA in 1995] was great. That Miami game [in 2003] when they had won 39 in a row was unbelievable, and what this year’s team is doing is pretty remarkable so far, too.

 

Q:  Conversely what has been the lowest moment in your career, either because of the result or just a bad game in the booth?

Roth:  I remember when we left the Carrier Dome in 1998 after the Syracuse loss; it was a real punch in the gut. That was a game that even now, 11 years later, you can still taste the bitterness. The Matt Ryan pass [for Boston College in 2007] had the same type of taste, and that was a bad day. We’ve lost to Duke in basketball with a half-court shot at the buzzer, and that’s the same thing. You don’t want to relive them.

 

Q:  Who has been your favorite athlete or team to cover?

Roth:  It would be unfair to pick out one athlete. I think one of the most unique teams we’ve had around here was the 1995 basketball team, which won the NIT (National Invitational Tournament). We had seven scholarship players, so you basically had five guys on the court and two guys on the bench. That team won 25 games and won an NIT Championship. What made those guys such a special team was the camaraderie and their trust in one another, and even to this day they are very tight. They still come back and are around here. In my mind, that was a very special group of guys, and it still is.

 

 

The football team that won the Sugar Bowl that year was very similar, too. They were very tight and remained close together. All of them have been successful, and they are now at points where they have beautiful families and are raising kids.

 

Q:  With sometimes little to no turnaround time, how do you adjust from calling football to basketball?

Roth:  This past year we had a basketball game in Puerto Rico on Friday, a football game here on Saturday and a basketball game back in Puerto Rico on Sunday. The key part of anything, and any broadcaster will tell you this, is the preparation. If you know a week or two in advance that you are going to have a schedule like that, you are going to plan for it…When you’re doing basketball, you’re totally focused on the game and the strategies, and then when you get back to football, you have a tunnel vision on football.

 

Q:  What does it take in a normal game week to prepare?

Roth:  It’s like preparing for an exam. We go over a bunch of stats, the players’ numbers, storylines and strategies. You read as much as you can. Each team will provide us with 20-30 pages of notes, and the league does, as well. Our job is to go through very closely and find that nugget or that little storyline and try to develop them as the game goes on and try to deliver that in an entertaining way. If there is a statistic out there that is important, that’s when you do it. You don’t just throw a number out there just to have it; you don’t want to use it as a space filler.

 

Q:  Besides play-by-play, you also do the Kroger Roth Report column, Tech Talk Live radio show and Virginia Tech Sports Today TV show. How does your preparation change for those different environments, and do you prefer one over the other?

Roth:  It’s like a student taking 15 credits. When I am figuring out the guests for Tech Talk Live or determining what questions I am going to ask Coach Beamer, you totally immerse yourself into what would fans want to ask if they were talking with him. As for the column, I had dinner with some of the Sigma Chi brothers last night, and I threw some ideas at them. You get together with friends and find out what people are talking about.

 

Q:  The Roanoke Times said “If football coach Frank Beamer is the leader of the Hokie Nation, and assistant coach Bud Foster is the Minister of Defense, then some might call Roth Tech's Secretary of State,” and Frank Beamer has said “When you hear his voice, you immediately think Virginia Tech football.” What does it mean to represent and basically be the voice of Virginia Tech athletics?

Roth:  Well, it’s an honor and it’s a great school. It is humbling, and it is a very unique place. The Hokie Nation is a really vibrant, loyal and passionate group, and I am just glad to be a part of it.

 

Q:  Besides Lane Stadium, what have been your best and worst stadium experiences?

Roth:  Texas A&M, LSU and Nebraska were all very unique in their own way. A football fan should try and see a game in all three places. I’m not so sure that one is better than the other, as LSU fans would claim Death Valley the best and an A&M fan would coin College Station as the best. One of the best parts of my job is that we get the opportunity to play in places like that, and in terms of Nebraska and Texas A&M, win. It’s hard to pick one. The real joy is going on the road. Whether you’re doing a game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, Madison Square Garden or Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium, [with the] biggest crowd that they had ever had for a game when Tech went there, that’s what is kind of unique about it.

 

 

There are so many people that travel with the radio crew. If you have a small booth, it’s crowded. Western Michigan was really tiny, and we couldn’t fit everybody in. We have all the gear and people, and that was tough. When we first played Rutgers, they didn’t even have a radio booth, and you had to broadcast from the main press box, and that was tough.

 

Q:  What advice do you have to aspiring sports broadcasters that want to succeed?

Roth:  Get on the air as soon as you can, practice, intern and make as many contacts as soon as you can. Get on the air early with a campus station or a radio station and enjoy it, because it is wonderful profession, and if you love sports and have a knack for it, it will be tremendously fulfilling. The relationships you build with players, coaches and fans alike are very special.