‘It was time.’ Why Greg Stotelmyer, longtime voice of EKU sports, is retiring
Greg Stotelmyer’s first four seasons calling Eastern Kentucky University football games on the radio all ended the same way: With EKU playing in the national championship game.
Coach Roy Kidd’s Colonels won what was then the 1-AA national title in 1979 and 1982 and finished as runner-up in 1980 and 1981.
“Now, when I’m 70, rather than in my mid-20s, I wish I could have done that later in life, where I appreciated it more, and I think was better at the job,” Stotelmyer said.
After serving for more than four decades as the “voice of the Eastern Kentucky Colonels,” Stotelmyer announced Thursday that he is retiring as the EKU football and men’s basketball play-by-play announcer.
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The reasons for stepping away after calling 498 EKU football games and 1,315 Colonels’ men’s basketball contests are multiple, Stotelmyer said.
Stotelmyer’s wife, Paula, has recently retired from her job as a neonatal intensive care unit nurse for UK HealthCare. With both retired, the couple envisions more time to pursue shared passions.
“We love to travel. We’ve been to tons of countries. I’ve been to all 50 states,” Stotelmyer said. “We want to travel more. We both love to hike, and I want to get back on my road bike and cycle more and camp more”.
There are also five grandchildren to spoil. “Grandkids keep you young,” Stotelmyer said.
The altered landscape of college athletics also had an impact on Stotelmyer’s decision to step away from full-time play-by-play.
A former news reporter for Lexington television station WTVQ, Stotelmyer is meticulous, bordering on obsessive, in his preparation for each of his play-by-play broadcasts.
“I’m a detail guy, always have been,” he said. “I want to know where (players) went to high school. Do they have a hobby. Did they get accolades somewhere. I like the tidbits, did their dad or mom play (sports), all that kind of stuff.”
In an era of unlimited player mobility, reaching that level of preparation for each player in a game had become arduous.
“Let’s take a football team,” Stotelmyer said. “If I have 60 players from the other team on my bio (sheet), well I used to have 40, 45, of them, that I could look back at what they did last year, and (carry) it over. Same thing with the EKU roster. Now, it’s like a new team every year. The preparation had just become a grind.”
Stotelmyer said the idea of cutting back on the amount of prep he did for each broadcast did not work for him. “I tried to say, ‘OK, just don’t do as much preparation.’ I just couldn’t do it,” he said.
The announcer, who is in the Eastern Kentucky University Athletics Hall of Fame, is a college alumnus of Western Kentucky University. At the time Stotelmyer first became the Colonels’ radio announcer, there was no more contentious college sports rivalry in the commonwealth than EKU vs. WKU.
How did a “Western man” end up calling Eastern games?
Stotelmyer said he was working for a Bowling Green radio station while finishing academic requirements at WKU when a salesman at the station, Eddie Woodruff, left to take a job in Richmond.
Said Stotelmyer: “He calls me one day in late September, early October of 1978 and says, ‘Hey, there’s a job up here in Richmond, at WEKY(-AM 1340). I think you could do some EKU games too, but you’d be the news director.’ I didn’t take the job in October, but I did take it in January. And that’s how I got here.”
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Having signed on to call EKU football in 1979, Stotelmyer was in place for the heyday of Kidd’s iconic run (1964 through 2002) as Colonels coach.
“When you walked into the stadium, you knew we were going to win games,” Stotelmyer said. “You knew Roy Kidd was a great coach. You knew we had talent, and when it came down to crunch time, 90% of the time, EKU pulled it out.”
Yet, as a native of basketball-mad Indiana, Stotelmyer said the best memory of his tenure as Colonels play-by-play announcer came in 2005 when Travis Ford coached Eastern to the NCAA men’s hoops tournament. It was EKU’s first trip to March Madness since 1979.
“We went through some really bad years (in men’s basketball), and then you could just see with Travis that we were building the right way," Stotelmyer said. “So I think of all the sports memories over 47 years, that one sticks out the most.”
Though he is retiring from his role with Eastern, Stotelmyer is not entirely leaving sports broadcasting. He hopes to continue his play-by-play duties on the radio network that broadcasts Kentucky high school state tournaments in boys and girls basketball, as well as softball.
As he contemplates no longer being “the voice of the EKU Colonels,” Stotelmyer said the players, coaches and games are what he will miss.
“I’ll miss the thrill of it being part of it,” he said. “But the preparation just got to the point where I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was time.”
