Q & A With Pac-12’s Mike Yam

Ruben Lopez

Mike Yam is a 2003 Fordham University graduate. He got his start in sports media with WFUV radio in New York. After graduation, Mike did radio for Sirius and ESPN Radio. He went on to work for ESPN for nearly four years, where he hosted SportsCenter, among other shows. During his broadcasting career, Mike has covered a wide range of sports. He is currently a studio host with the Pac-12 Network.

I had the opportunity of meeting Mike when he was a guest speaker for The Daily Californian sports staff. He shared his experiences in the sports industry with us student reporters. At the conclusion of his talk, he offered his contact information to all of us, and a few weeks I contacted him via Twitter to ask if I could interview him. When he met with our staff, he was a friendly guy and graciously answered any questions that were asked. True to form, he agreed to the interview. Mike was kind enough to conduct a phone interview after his flight had landed at SFO. We spoke on the phone while he was in a car making his way home.

Ruben Lopez: I know you work with the Pac-12 Network now and you’ve worked with ESPN, NBA TV. I just want to get a backstory on how you got started in broadcasting.

Mike Yam: Yeah, so I went to Fordham in New York and kinda wanted to go down the medical route and be a pediatrician. After a semester I realized that that wasn’t going to happen for me and joined the radio station. They had a really good station at Fordham. It was called WFUV, and we had opportunities to do talk shows and updates and cover the teams in the city, which was awesome because it was New York. It was the pro teams like the Knicks and the Nets and the Giants and the Jets so, you know, there’s a lot of really good opportunities for me. Then, after I graduated my first real job was in radio at Sirius and I was able to do an all sports show for them and an all-NBA show. That ended up just leading to more opportunities with NBA TV ESPN radio, and now Pac-12 network.

Ruben Lopez: You said that you wanted to do medical the medical route initially, but after one semester you decided it wasn’t for you anymore. Was that just because the classes weren’t interesting for you or was it you having different interests?

Mike Yam: No, I loved the classes, but chemistry was a little bit of a butt-kicker for me and I just wasn’t going to be able to handle passing a class on the curve. That was something that was hard for me. I was a pretty good student. When I was in school I never really needed a curve. When I got to college, those big classes were kinda kicking my butt a little bit. I was fortunate. I was able to find something pretty quickly that I was passionate and interested in.

Ruben Lopez: Did you always want to do broadcasting or did you think of doing print journalism?

Mike Yam: You know broadcast for me was, I wouldn’t say, necessarily, I fell into it, but in a lot of ways I did. I think when I was younger someone had put a bug in my ear, just sort of said, “Hey, you know, you got a pretty good voice. Maybe you should think about radio.” That was when I was in high school, and I never considered that as a viable option for me. I think when I had heard that as a young kid, it just planted a seed. Like I said, I wanted to be a pediatrician my entire life. So, I wasn’t thinking necessarily media and an opportunity in sports, but when I realized that that path wasn’t going to be for me, suddenly there was an interest that drew me towards media. I love sports. I always played growing up and I really enjoyed it. Once again, I never realized that having a job in sports when you don’t play is really a viable option. I think people get that people work for teams and are in the front office. I don’t think growing up I had any real understanding of just how huge the industry was and the opportunities that were available to anyone, really, as long as you just kind of worked hard and made the right connections and pushed forward. Those became viable options down the road for me as an adult.

Ruben Lopez: You said you did WFUV, the radio station, covering all professional sports team. So, you were covering professional sports teams while in college?

Mike Yam: That was one of the perks of going to Fordham. So WFUV was actually not a student station. It was a public station, and it just happened to be on Fordham’s campus. It was a lot of different networks at the radio station at the time that were still students, but everything was professionally run, including the sports departments. The sports team had a lot more autonomy than music and news did at the time. We had the guy that was kind of our executive producer for the team, but we ran the ship. We leaned on him, certainly, as the adult (laughs) so to speak. By the time I was a junior, I was the assistant sports manager. then, my senior year I was the sports manager, so I was in charge of a lot of things with regards to reaching out to some of the teams to make sure we had credentials, making sure that our schedules were complete for filling shifts throughout the course of the week. There was a lot of different things that that I was tasked with when I was there.

Ruben Lopez: As far as your broadcasting, who were some influences to help you in shaping the way you broadcast?

Mike Yam: It’s a really good question because I think a lot of people when they want to go down a path of broadcasting, they gravitate towards people. If you want to be a sportscaster you just grow up your watching sports you see people’s styles and what they do when they’re on air. I think, for me, not a lot of mentors that came from Fordham to listen and critique my tapes. Mike Breen was such a huge influence on me, who was at that time and still does Knicks games. He’s the main ESPN voice for the NBA on ESPN and he would give me great feedback. Dave Sims, who’s now the play-by-play voice for the Seattle Mariners, was another one. and you know guys that were just a few years older than me that had success out of school. And then when I got to ESPN, there were a lot of anchors and hosts that I really respected their work and they were next level announcers. The thing that I tell young sportscasters is you’re going to have to find your own unique style, but through time, as you’re watching people, take bits and pieces of things that people do that you like. I think for me, one guy, and I ever really worked with him when I was at ESPN, but I would see some of the things that he would do and that was Karl Ravech and his ability to not go off of a script. He would ad lib everything and that was something that I wanted to do myself. At this point at Pac-12 Network, that’s exactly what I do. I’m not a scripted studio host and I ad lib pretty much everything that I do on air at this point. 

Ruben Lopez: Being a host at the Pac-12 Network, and you hosted ESPN shows and NBA TV, I’m sure you’ve had to work with athletes who may not be TV trained. How do you handle something like that?

Mike Yam: I think the one thing when you work with someone who doesn’t have television experience as an analyst, they have such a wealth of knowledge just because of their experiences. So, their ability to explain what it’s like on the field, off the field, the demands of student-athletes, what’s it like to be a pro, the stories and the situations that they’ve been in that very few have, and I think for me it’s my job to make sure that they understand I’m going to put you in a good spot. I want you to just tell me what you’re seeing when you watch the film. Does it compare to anything that you went through when you were playing? What was it like for you when you dealt with an injury? Those are the types of things that these guys should be comfortable talking about. As analysts they are the ones who take what is happening currently and relate it to what they have gone through themselves so that people have a better understanding of situations whether it be football or basketball. The other thing is, you know, I was working with Don MacLean the other day, who’s one of our main studio analysts for basketball, and every time I work with Don I learn something new about the game, which is awesome for me. There’s a quick observation that he could make about a team or a person, and his personnel evaluations are so spot-on and it’s things that you don’t even think about. Kevin O’Neill’s another guy that I used to work with and KO is great. You know people think about jumping ability in basketball. He would say things like, “Watch the second jump,” and I was like well what do you mean? He was like, “You know when a guy is going for a rebound sometimes there’s a quick hop and then a second jump, and sometimes that explosive one guys can’t always do that.” So, it’s these subtle things that these guys that have been trying their entire lives to see that I think it’s my job to make sure that that is conveyed to the audience.

Ruben Lopez: You said you don’t script the shows, so how do you prepare for a show with no script?

Mike Yam: It took me a while to get to the point where I didn’t have to write the shows, but my philosophy now is if I know the material I’m not going to in a bad situation. What I mean by that is I read everything. There’s hundreds of pieces, you know articles, that come out during the course of the week that I’m reading so that I know all the storylines surrounding our teams, understand injuries, understand who’s doing what in the conference. I scan some of the statistical stuff. I don’t harp on it, but if I know that there’s some trends that are interesting to me I kind of bookmark those in my head. But for me, it’s just knowing the material and if you know material you’re always going to be okay on set.

Ruben Lopez: How do you go about deciding what’s something that you just think kind of keeping the back of your mind and something that you should study more?

Mike Yam: Just what interests me, and that’s the beauty of these shows. I think for a lot of young broadcasters, they feel like they have to know everything. It’s impossible. You will never know everything about every single team or every single sport. There’s way too much involved in that. My job is to find the stuff that I find interesting and hope that the people that are watching also find those things interesting. If I can make sure that those things are the things that make the shows, then, if I’m entertained or if I’m learning something I think by and large the people who are watching should probably also feel that same way at least that’s the goal.

 Ruben Lopez: Journalism nowadays has gone through big changes. So, I just wanted to get your thoughts on how it has evolved throughout the time you’ve been in broadcasting.

Mike Yam: It’s so different, you know, just the amount of outlets is huge. When I was in school it was the newspapers. Shortly after I graduated a lot of things started going digital and now it’s become paid content, like sites like The Athletic for example. You can still get the free content occasionally on local sites, but even a lot of them are charging right now. Then you just think about podcasts, which weren’t even a thing really back in the day, that now give opportunities for people to not only get experience but make a name for themselves. Then there’s the whole social media thing that, you know I was Myspace. Facebook was starting the year after I graduated college. I mean that wasn’t even something that that was available to me. You think about Twitter and Instagram and how we consume a lot of the information. It is just radically different and staying ahead of it is hard because it’s so unpredictable and no one knows what the next big thing is. So, I feel like executives just tend to follow the crowd. So if the next hot thing is Snapchat, people were jumping all in on Snapchat, but the reality is that was two years ago. Snapchat’s not as popular as it was, and it’s become an Instagram Story world. What’s going to be the next thing? No one really knows I feel like we’re constantly, the media, trying to chase where the audience is without being able to stand in front of it, which is really difficult.

 Ruben Lopez: With social media making such a huge impact on journalism, how do you use social media, like to help you or to promote?

Mike Yam: I think it’s for both. It’s finding stories, for example Adam Jude from the Seattle Times, I think is one of the best guys in the conference for the Pac-12 who covers a team, you know, I read everything that he posts because he’s really good. I find most of the stuff on Twitter because he’s pretty active there, and that goes for a lot of the writers in the league. As far as some of the other social media outlets, well, if I’m doing an interview with a student-athlete, I’m looking at his social accounts. What’s he interested in? What are the activities that he does? Who does he hang out with on the team? We just did, I’m driving  back to my apartment, but I just landed from Portland. I was up in Corvallis the last couple days. We did a day-in-the-life feature with Isaiah Hodgins, who is sophomore wide receiver for the Beavs. Yeah, I go through his social media accounts. He lives with his brother. He lives with Artavis Pierce, who’s one of their running backs. So, you know to be able to find out some of that information that becomes available because of social media now.

Ruben Lopez: So, being that you came up doing radio, did you get into podcasts?

Mike Yam: I used to have my own podcast. It’s funny because there’s so many opportunities to do things. So, I just was interested in getting more radio work and going back to my roots because I’ve been doing television for so long. I said, “You know what, I love telling stories and I love hearing about people and their experiences.” So, I started a podcast where I just talked to a lot of guys that I’ve worked with, whether it’s broadcasters or athletes, and just you know, find out about the things that they’ve done. That was really fun for me. I think I did that for I think I did 40 some odd episodes and it was interesting. I had to produce it myself. I had to reteach myself how to edit audio. The technology has changed since the last time I had to do that, which is like 15 years ago. So to go through the process of learning how to edit, booking my own guests, producing that show was eye-opening. It was a lot of fun for me, but that led to some opportunities to do radio part time again. I started working for Tune In doing an NBA show for them and now I work for Sirius XM and do a lot of work on their Pac-12 radio channel.

Ruben Lopez: Was the transition hard when you went back after not doing radio for so long and being on TV now and doing the podcast?

Mike Yam: You get a little rusty when you don’t have those reps. It’s just like anything else. If I do a television show and I go on vacation for a couple days, which is rare for me, but I’m not at the studio for a week, that first show back I just feel like I’m out of sync. It had been a while since I’ve done radio. So, for sure I felt a little rusty, but it took me a few shows and kind of just get right back into it again.

Ruben Lopez: What kind of skills can translate from TV to radio or radio to TV?

Mike Yam: The ability to transition and host is huge on the radio side and helped me on the television side. I think from the TV perspective there’s less things I can take away from television. I always think that if you could do radio you could do TV, but not every television person can do radio. Transitions for me, I’m anal about those. I want everything to sound conversational and smooth. I think that’s a skill that you learn in radio and that I use on the television side.

Ruben Lopez: And when you were coming up doing radio at Fordham what kinds of challenges did you face?

Mike Yam: Getting that first job. That’s the hardest thing, you know. Those first few jobs out of school are really difficult to get. For me that was one of the harder things about kind of breaking into the business. I think any young aspiring sportscaster is going to have challenges with that. There are a lot of opportunities for them now.

Ruben Lopez: Could you talk a little bit about your time at ESPN? ESPN at one point was like a dream job. So, I just want to know what your experience was like.

Mike Yam: There was a lot of really good things that I took away from my experience there. I was able to do SportsCenter, which was a huge goal of mine. I loved it. I made so many different friends. I got to work on projects like college football. I did the NBA when I was there. I  did some Nascar as well, college football and college basketball. So I was put in some really cool situations. I got to work with some really great folks. The one thing that I will say is the resources there are amazing and unlike any other sports places I’ve ever been at. It really was for me a huge learning experience and I don’t think I get my job at PAC-12 Network without the experience at ESPN. I mean you’re just put in situations on live television that you’re just never going to be in at any other network just based off of the sheer volume of things that they have to work with there.

Ruben Lopez: You went from ESPN to Pac 12, and you were there for the launch. How was that experience being able to launch a new network?

Mike Yam: It was one of the coolest things in my entire career. That night was unforgettable for me. I was having problems getting out of my contract to make the launch and when I finally did I got there and I did SportsCenter on a Saturday. Flew from Connecticut to San Francisco on Sunday and I got right to work on Monday. We were setting up the studio and there was a lot of tapings because they were worried about some of the glitches that might occur because everything’s pretty new equipment. You kind of go through the launch on that Wednesday and I just remember my heart pounding right before we had done that show. When it was over, it was an hour show, I just remember going into our touchdown room, which is what our green room is now, and Rick Neuheisel, who is our main football analyst for a couple years, had this bottle of Dom Perignon, which I never had before. He took it out of the fridge and he said, “Hey guys, when I was a coach, we celebrated our wins because they were hard to come by.” I just remember being with the entire group of on-air people and our president. He said, “Today was a win,” and we all took a sip from the bottle, which is one of the coolest moments that I’ve had in my career.

Ruben Lopez: Any kind of advice that you have for aspiring broadcasters, journalists, or just someone that wants to get into sports media?

 Mike Yam: I would say just say yes to opportunities. Hustle. Be willing to do the extra work. This industry is so competitive but there are opportunities out there for everyone if you want to make it in this business. There are different ways and there’s only so many jobs, whether it’s at Pac-12 network or FS1 or ESPN or wherever you want to be. I would say for anyone who is aspiring to be a sportscaster worry less about where you’re working and concern yourself more with the work that you are doing because it’s your face, it’s your name, it’s your voice, it’s your words that people are going to see and, granted there are large platforms that you can have at different places, but if you do good work It will get noticed. I think the biggest thing I can say is just hustle. Grind. Be willing to outwork other people and you’ll be in good shape.