BCSN to air highlights show 5 nights a week

1/8/2014

On the heels of the success of one popular weekly show, a new nightly show has emerged for Buckeye Cable Sports Network.

Sports Nightly will debut at 10:30 p.m. on Monday on BCSN. Ken Watlington and Eric Haubert will host Sports Nightly, a show devoted to local sports highlights, scores, and analysis that will air five nights a week. Sports Nightly will air for a half hour Monday through Thursday and for 45 minutes on Friday night before leading into WTVG Channel 13’s basketball Friday show.

Sports Nightly will pick up where Overtime, a one-hour highlight show broadcast each Friday night on BCSN for the past nine months, leaves off.

“That show was so successful, so we decided to take it to the next level, from a one-hour show once a week to a nightly 30-minute show,” said Veronica Pinciotti, the director and general manager of local stations for BCSN. “It will have game highlights and upcoming events that will be previewed, and it’s based on the success of Overtime.”

“Overtime,” Pinciotti said, "received plenty of public feedback, whether it was through text messages the show’s hosts received during live broadcasts or through emails that were received through the evening or during the next day.

“It’s surprising because when it comes to sports, it’s almost as dynamic as politics because everybody wants to talk about it,” Pinciotti said. “People want to be a commentator, and people have their own opinion about an event, and that has a lot of validity when it comes to programming.”

Tom Cole will be an in-host interviewer and a reporter for Sports Nightly and said Overtime became a proving ground for BCSN’s nightly show, which will be re-aired later each weeknight on BCSN2.

Cole said the challenge of taking on a new show will be to produce information in a timely manner on a nightly basis.

“We’ve hired more people, and that will help,” Cole said. “We have a built-in advantage in that there are 900 events a year, so we have all this information and that gives us a library of information that we can constantly use as a resource.”

Sports Nightly will also have a larger window to do that.

“This is what’s changed over the last 10 years,” Pinciotti said. “There’s ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, and they’ve taken some of the market away from the local news channels, who get 2-3 minutes a night for sports, period. You can lightly highlight the big names and games. There are more than 100 games every single week in the Toledo area, high school and college, and there’s a myriad of sports. We’re up to 54 different sports in northwest Ohio, whether it’s basketball or bowling.”

Block Communications Inc. is the parent company of The Blade, Buckeye CableSystem, and BCSN.

Contact Rachel Lenzi at: rlenzi@theblade.com, 419-724-6510, or on Twitter @RLenziBlade.