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Why Terry Gannon is great for gymnastics and Verne Lundquist was great for figure skating

14 August, 2019 / Kat

A brief historical look of the best – and worst – of figure skating and gymnastics TV hosts

The Gymternet (gymnastics fans on the Internet) might not be able to agree about much, but they can agree that Terry Gannon is one of the best TV hosts the sport has ever had. The reason why Gannon stands out as such a solid host is similar to how Verne Lundquist stood out for figure skating fans in the 1990s: he doesn’t act too good for the sport.

While Gannon has spoken little on his work on gymnastics (which only started last year), one needs to look at his long-time work on figure skating to see how he might approach gymnastics – and why he is so good at it.

“He never makes a mistake. He’s got a photographic memory; he just looks at something and talks to himself for about 20 seconds … then they’ll do a take, live, and he’s perfect every time. That kind of delivery demands that you are on your ‘A’ game, too. Plus, he has a profound understanding of what goes into being an elite skater. He’s a quick study of sport.” –Peter Carruthers, one of Gannon’s skating analysts, in Kelli Lawrence’s Skating on Air

Lundquist, who covered figure skating from 1989 – 1998, received similar praise to Gannon’s. It’s hosting based on respecting the sport, putting in the necessary work to cover it right, and developing a rapport with his analysts. Also from Lawrence’s book:

“Verne isn’t a play-by-play guy who steps over the line,’ says Rick Gentile (CBS Sports). ‘He’s not a guy who needs to show the audience how much he knows about the sport. He gets the basic strategy of deferring to the analyst: ‘What’s good about that … why they are doing this…’ set up the skaters, let Scott (Hamilton) analyze, then give them the scores.’”

Contrast those views with those of former NBC Sports gymnastics host Al Trautwig, who struggled with showcasing his analysts and treating gymnastics as a true sport.

“’I don’t spend any time at all learning what an Amanar is,’ Al Trautwig, NBC’s longtime gymnastics play-by-play man said in a recent interview. This willful ignorance has affected viewers.” – Reeves Wiedeman, Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage , The New Yorker, August 2016

Trautwig admitted that he was not interested in studying the details of gymnastics, and that he preferred relying on telling personal stories of the athletes. He gave in a bit to the popular producing view of either wanting to make it a soap opera or this rare activity that no one has ever seen before, ever. He, and some of his fellow hosts, didn’t want to compliment his analysts, but talk over them and assume that their analysis was completely foreign. His point-of-view was never well-liked, and took an awful turn in recent times when he decided to insist both on air and on social media that Simone Biles’ adoptive parents were not her parents. Biles doesn’t hide that her biological parents have not been a part of her life, and that she refers to her grandparents as her parents. Any media member who would take time to review their prep material would know that, and to either not review that, or decide that that “correction” would be the hill he died on was Trautwig’s gymnastics undoing.

There are times that an educated fan of a sport may find the announcing poor, but it is the best that can be expected given the situation. An example of this in these sports was the late Jim Simpson, who was paired with Olympic silver medalist Peter Carruthers during TNT’s 1992 Winter Olympics figure skating coverage. The first ever radio announcer of a Super Bowl had a difficult task in Albertville: he had to cover the entire event, last place finisher to gold medalist. He had done his preparation, but still struggled to commentate when women were struggling to get double jumps around in the long program. Simpson’s commentary struggled, but at some point, what can you say? He did what he could. He wasn’t the best, but nothing came from a place of dislike or disinterest, like some other announcers have done over the years.

It is well-noted that Jim McKay downright disliked his skating assignments, and it is seen in his recycling of phrases from Olympics to Olympics — most notably, “This is the loneliest sport in the world,” a phrase used in both John Curry’s and Robin Cousins’ gold medal winning free skates in 1976 and 1980. Luckily for McKay, he was bolstered by skating’s most famous commentator, Dick Button, who has no filter, but a Harvard vocabulary to make the lack of restraint sound authoritative.

As a gymnastics commentator, John Tesh (who covered multiple Olympics in the 1990s and 2000s) showed interest and treated the sport with gravitas, but was befallen with the presentation (either from him or his production team) that the sport was a soap opera. He had to set every single routine as a do-or-die event, even if it wasn’t. (If he did that in Atlanta, with a seven gymnast team, what would he do with the four gymnast team format being used in Tokyo next year?!) Part of this could be Tesh’s background – toggling from entertainment to sports to back learn to his style and how he was used. For a production team, it’s easy to assume that the guy well-known for covering fluff should be the guy who hosts what they perceive as the fluff sports.

Gannon – and the best host prior to him, Lundquist – treat gymnastics and skating as something not beneath them, not as fluff, but something they genuinely want to learn more about. They like what they are doing. They don’t want to deduce it to a drama (despite some of their analysts trying to do so, cough cough Tara and Johnny), but showcase them as difficult and fantastic athletic events. That’s why Gannon is so refreshing to gymnastics fans – getting true athletic commentary for a sport that rarely gets it is exactly what fans have wanted for decades.

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On Writing, Working and Family

1 March, 2019 / Kat

For the first time in over a decade, my office decided to add positions. We had acquired staff via mergers or reorganization, but we had not had the opportunity to add staff we sorely needed.

I was coming back from my second maternity leave as both positions were announced and posted. I shared the positions on my LinkedIn account, posting, “I get to be your assistant, so you should apply.”

Then someone messaged me asking a hard question: why wasn’t I applying for either job? I’ve been in the office nearly 13 years and have a Master’s degree in Educational Administration. One would think that I’m qualified.

I paused as I realized the really difficult answer.

“Because I’ve spent the last seven years chasing something else.”

Since I was a teenager, I had wanted to be a sportswriter. I wanted to cover figure skating and gymnastics. After reading the Sports Illustrated coverage of Steve Young finally winning Super Bowl XXIX, I decided I also wanted to cover football. I originally went to college for sports journalism and ran into a professor freshman year who discouraged the three of us females in his class from pursuing it. I took that to heart and changed majors and transferred schools. But I continued blogging about sports, and then found myself picking up freelance gigs. First I wrote about lacrosse for the Examiner, then Inside Lacrosse, then the Newton Patch and things began to snowball from there. It took up some of my weekends, but wasn’t too intrusive.

Seven years ago, I got a surprise message from a Boston newspaper asking me to write about high school sports. I honestly thought it was a hoax, until I confirmed with a friend that the editor contacting me was indeed a real person. Holy smokes, a real newspaper in a major city — a city much larger than my home city of Rochester, NY — wanted me to write for them. How could I turn that down?

The schedule took some time to get used to, but soon enough, I was working 2-4 days a week. I would leave my day job at 5pm, and then go to the newspaper or to a game assignment. I worked at least one weekend day, if not both. I loved it. Some writers believe they are “better than” covering high school sports. Where I grew up, high school sports were everything, so to me, covering high school sports is as good of a beat as you can have.

I kept taking assignments, picking up shifts, and picking up freelance gigs, thinking, “I must be on the brink. If I work really hard at this, someone will hire me full-time, right?” It began to intrude on my day job and my marriage. My husband went days without seeing each other, with him traveling out to Western Massachusetts for work nearly every other day, and me finding myself either taking scores or covering a game every night. Our relationship was not in the best place. At my day job, I stopped being able to stay late and meet with students. I shrugged off networking events in my field and never went to conferences. I used my vacation time to cover sporting events, not take an actual vacation. I couldn’t work on Saturdays, something crucial to working with college students, because I was covering sports.

Soon I had kids, and I tried not to miss a beat. If I keep going, then soon I’ll be able to freelance full-time and take the kids out of daycare.

The bankruptcy of the newspaper didn’t stop me. Writers losing jobs around me didn’t stop me. This is going to work out, I swear. This is what I’m meant to do.

Until this month.

This month, I had to face the depressing realization that maybe sportswriting isn’t what I’m meant to do. I can’t keep juggling everything. I missed deadlines. I missed my kids. I found myself depressed, anxious, and angry at myself for not being able to make everything work.

When I say yes to a sports writing gig, it means I’m saying no to something else. My day job and my family have been receiving a whole bunch of nos. Someone close to me once asked if my writing was a hobby or a career. They thought I should look at it as a hobby, and maybe they are right. Maybe I’m just meant to write online here and there. If I earn some extra money from doing so, that’s great.

That is a really difficult thing to make terms with, and it won’t happen overnight. I had to prioritize my family and day job over covering my favorite high school sporting event of the year this weekend. I wanted to say yes to the assignment in the worst way. But I had to say no. It was a punch in the gut.

I am sharing this because I know many part-time sportswriters who have struggled with this same call. When do you call it quits? Should you ever call it quits, and just keep a toe in writing forever, holding out hope that something will work out? We’re told to find our passion and make that our career, but what if that just never pans out?

I don’t have the answers at all. It’s going to take me a long time to find them.

The Two Greg Zuerleins

2 February, 2019 / Kat

You’re getting ready for Super Bowl Sunday. You’re familiarizing yourself with the rosters of both the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams. You see Greg Zuerlein, the Rams’ kicker, and head to YouTube to watch a few of his past field goals.

And instead of field goals, you find figure skating.

No, the Rams’ “Greg The Leg” didn’t have a past life as a figure skater. He just happens to share a name with a former World Junior Champion skater whose former partner is a two-time Olympian.

Greg Zuerlein was the 2009 World Junior Champion in ice dance with Madison Chock. If Chock’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she has represented the U.S. at both the 2014 and 2018 Olympics with current partner Evan Bates (a three-time Olympian in his own right.) Chock and Zuerlein competed from 2006-11, winning not only that World Junior title, but a National junior title, a bronze on the senior level at Nationals and a top ten finish at the World Championships.

The name “Greg Zuerlein” isn’t exactly like the name “John Smith.” What are the odds that two high-level athletes would share the exact same name? I don’t know if the two happen to be related, though I’m sure it would have come up in skating circles prior to Super Bowl Weekend if they were.

A Guide to the TD Garden for the U.S Gymnastics Championships

13 August, 2018 / Kat

So you’re headed to Boston for the U.S. Gymnastics Championships. Welcome!

I am in the TD Garden five days a week. My commuter rail train to work comes through the lower level of the Garden (called North Station,) meaning I’m there at least once a day, usually twice. That makes me uniquely qualified to give you some tips and tricks for navigating the Championships and the area surrounding it. And trust me – you need them.

Warning: The TD Garden is a construction zone. – The Garden is in the midst of a multi-million dollar project to build a retail, restaurant and hotel complex in front of it. Massive skeletons of buildings now block the view of the Garden itself, making it a little confusing to navigate the area if you are not familiar with it.

Construction in front of the TD Garden in 2018 — Where did the Garden go? It’s behind this building.

Therefore, follow the signage for the Garden and don’t necessarily look for a giant building that says “TD Garden.” Two of the three entrances to the building itself have wooden plank covered walkways that can get very crowded before an event or at rush hour.

One of the walkways to the TD Garden and North Station.
An entrance to the TD Garden and North Station.

Leave some extra time to enter the arena. Some of the entrances to the arena itself (from the concourse) are closed due to the construction. Depending on the size of the crowd, they may open some doors in the stairways to facilitate quicker entrances. If they don’t, you will walk through the North Station concourse towards the ticket office in the middle. Right next to that will be an entrance to the arena itself. (Don’t worry – there are signs.)

Now, for the important stuff: food and coffee.

Coffee

Coffee status: excellent. – Do you like to drink coffee? Well, there might not be any better place in the country to hold this meet. (Except Seattle, of course.)

There are five coffee shops within steps of the arena, including two inside the North Station concourse (which you have to go into to enter the arena.) Okay, so four of them are Dunkin’ Donuts. Boston is obsessed with Dunkin’ Donuts, thus they are on every street corner. There are also Dunkin Donuts in the actual arena as well, bringing this count up to six.

The Canal Street Dunkin’ Donuts, the best in the North Station area.

The best Dunkin’ Donuts in the area is on Canal Street, so I recommend hitting up that location for your quality coffee needs. They also offer on-the-go ordering via the Dunkin’ Donuts app, which is key if you intend on getting your coffee in the early morning. Because that Dunkin’ is so good and well run, it often has long lines filled with construction workers ordering for their entire crew, making on-the-go ordering very helpful to those of us who just want to grab an iced coffee and run. That Dunkin’ closes at 6pm or 7pm every night, so that location will be able to carry you up through the evening sessions.

Boston Common Coffee Company near North Station

Don’t like Dunkin’? Don’t fret. One of my favorite independent coffee shops in all of Boston is also a stone’s throw from the Garden. Boston Common Coffee is expensive, but if you truly love coffee and good pastries, it is worth every single penny. They also have the BEST yogurt parfaits on the globe. It tastes like the most decadent dessert you’ve ever eaten, but it is actually good for you, with high quality Greek yogurt, house made granola and fruit. I think they run $5 a pop, but if you can splurge, I recommend it. They have a large seating area with wifi, so if your trip to the Championships has to be a working vacation, Boston Common Coffee will be your go-to. It was a favorite for many fans and skaters during the World Figure Skating Championships in 2016, and it will definitely gain a ton of fans during gymnastics as well.

Food & Drink

Bodega Canal (57 Canal Street) makes a heck of a margarita. The Mexican restaurant took the place of a favorite pre-game hangout of my friends, the Grand Canal, and really improved the interior, creating great seating areas for small and large groups. When it’s nice, they open the huge nearly floor-to-ceiling windows which creates such a cool scene on an otherwise dull part of Canal Street. I’ve heard amazing things about their food as well.

If you like beer, you have to at least try Boston Beer Works (112 Canal Street). It’s been a favorite of mine since I moved to Boston 14 years ago. It has multiple locations throughout the Boston area, and I think I may have tried them all except for Lowell at this point. They make all of their own beer, and can get very creative with flavors. During the summer, they sometimes have a Watermelon Beer that is one of my favorite beers of all time. It’s more tangy than sweet, and is really refreshing if the weather is hot. The standard Fenway Pale Ale is a solid choice. If you are a fan of French fries, as I am, their sour cream and chive fries are wonderful, amazing and addicting.

Need a slice of pizza? One of the most famous pizza places in all of Boston is Halftime Pizza, which is right on Causeway Street. It’s a no frills spot that will fill your pizza, pop and beer needs. Its hours vary and it’s not often open post-event, but for a quick bite pre-event or in-between sessions, you can’t go wrong.

Honorable mentions: The Fours, which has been posting some intriguing specials all summer – we’re talking nice dinner salads and some unique sandwich combos; Tasty Burger, which is brand new and adjacent to one of the Garden entrances (this is a perfect place if you have youngsters in tow) and Qdoba, not the best food in the world, but quick and (if you make the right choices) healthy-ish.

A throwback to David Quinn’s first season as Boston University head coach

23 May, 2018 / Kat

On Wednesday afternoon, the New York Rangers announced that Boston University men’s hockey head coach David Quinn would become their next head coach. I went back into my archives and found a draft of a profile of Quinn I wrote for the Boston University men’s hockey program back when he took over in 2013. A tightened and cleaned up version of this appeared in the Terriers’ program in the fall of 2013.
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Embed from Getty Images

Kevin Shattenkirk’s freshman year was not going exactly as planned.

The blueliner was struggling through the first games of his Boston University career in the fall of 2007. He was playing every game, but he and his entire team were floundering at the blue line, dropping four of their first five regular season games in and letting up 21 goals in the process.

Then David Quinn, then in his fourth year as the associate head coach of the Terriers, intervened.

“A month into my freshman season, I was doing poorly,” recalls Shattenkirk, now a fourth year NHL defenseman with the St. Louis Blues. “Coach Quinn pulled me aside and told me that I could do better, and that I would get better and he knew how to do it, but that it was not going to be easy.

“He told me he was going to push me, but he wasn’t going to baby me. It was then that I realized that I needed to grow up and handle hockey and school differently. He got me playing at a higher level.”

Quinn’s ability to motivate and mentor high talent players like Shattenkirk are what made him an ideal choice to succeed Jack Parker as the 11th head coach of the Terriers. The Cranston, Rhode Island native and College of Arts and Sciences graduate has demonstrated the ability to coach and develop players at a variety of levels bringing experiences from across USA Hockey, Division I hockey, the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League to his first Division I head coaching job.

Through all of his experiences, it was Quinn’s time as a member of the Terriers defensive corps from 1984-88 that shaped how he would approach leading young hockey players. He realized how much his own coach influenced him when Parker brought him on board as an associate coach in 2004.

“It really struck me how similar our coaching styles were,” explains Quinn. “I knew I had learned a lot from playing here, but I really realized how much I learned from him when I started coaching with him. So much of my coaching philosophy was shaped by playing for him.”

What Parker imparted on an young Quinn was that coaching student-athletes is a lesson in shaping the entire player. Being a supportive ear during the tumultuous times of young adulthood is as much of the position as setting up lines of forwards. Quinn did not realize this completely until his junior year, when he was diagnosed with Christmas disease, a blood clotting disorder that made playing hockey, especially at one of the most physical positions, defense, extremely dangerous. His playing career came to an end years before he expected it to.

“My career ended so abruptly after my junior year, so I kind of was a lost 20 year old,” admits Quinn. “I was trying to figure out what I was going to do because I had anticipated I was going to be playing hockey for the next 15 years. I wasn’t thinking about anything else, but after going through a difficult time, I knew I wanted to stay in the game in some way, shape or form.

“Because I think of what my personal experience was, if Jack Parker only cared of me as a player, God knows what I would be doing today.”

Quinn caught the coaching bug from his first coaching opportunity. The chance came in 1994 from the man who recruited him to play on Commonwealth Avenue, former BU assistant and Olympic Team coach Ben Smith. Smith had moved on to serve as head coach of a familiar foe: Northeastern.

“Ben lost his assistant coach in August. By luck and friendship, he offered me the assistant coaching job, which was an incredible opportunity,” recalls Quinn. “And from that point on, I knew it was something I loved. I knew in my life how impactful my coaches had been for me, and I wanted to do the same for others.”

After two years on Huntington Avenue, Quinn moved on to help build the Division I program at University of Nebraska-Omaha from the ground up as the top assistant coach. Unlike many in similar positions, he never had a chance to cut his coaching teeth on a non-Division I program – he was thrown into the college hockey elite immediately.

Looking back, Quinn notes that there may have been a bit of a learning curve.

“There was a lot of uncertainty. When you’ve never coached, and all of a sudden you’re coaching a Division 1 team, it can be a little overwhelming and intimidating,” says Quinn. “I always thought to myself, ‘It’s hockey, and I’m dealing with people.’ If you can stick to that and don’t get distracted by the other stuff, no matter what level you’re coaching at, you are good.”

Quinn soon found himself leading the USA Hockey’s Under 17 developmental program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and found himself with what was his biggest coaching challenge to that date: the unique perspectives of 16 year olds.

“That was my first head coaching experience. The two things I knew I improved on dramatically were my patience level and my communications skills,” chuckles Quinn. “I was amazed at how little 16 year olds knew.”

The teenagers gave him perspective that would serve him well when leading hockey players a decade older.

“The thing I took from that experience that I’ve tried to apply to the higher levels is that you have to be patient,” explains Quinn. “You have a vision of how you want your team to play, the perfect way you want them to do things, but you can’t hold them to that standard every day. You have to think to yourself, ‘Well if my team made 20 mistakes on Monday, and 19 mistakes on Tuesday, that was a good day.’ You have to consume yourself with the progress instead of consuming yourself with the finished product. “

Quinn’s increased patience paid off and his Under-17 squads succeeded under his tenure. He lifted them to a 10-3 record internationally. Domestically, his team was finally a playoff contender among other teams in the North American Hockey League, many of which were made up of players an age group older.

Soon, another former college coach of Quinn’s came calling: Parker. He became associate coach and lead recruiter for the Terriers. His touches were seen especially on defense, where he coached several of the program’s recent professional defensmen: 2009 Hobey Baker winner Matt Gilroy, Brian Strait and Shattenkirk.

Quinn’s ability to mold student-athletes into solid pro prospects and solid people caught the eye of Craig Billington, the Assistant General Manager of the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche. He was keeping an eye on his team’s draftees on for the Terriers, including ‘07 pick Shattenkirk, and was impressed by Quinn’s tutelage.

“I found a man who was passionate for developing players, about communication skills and passionate for the game of hockey,” recalls Billington. “His read on people and his ability to communicate creates a good environment for the young men in his program.”

Shattenkirk credits Quinn’s environment for preparing him to play pro hockey. “I think what was so important to us was how detailed he was,” says Shattenkirk of his time at BU. “At practice everyday, he never accepted less than our best. If you were having a bad day, you had to put that aside. That is definitely how it is in the pro game.”

The level of detail Quinn imparts he sees as the key to coaching hockey players at the top of their games.

“The older the player you coach, the more thorough you have to be in your explanation,” explains Quinn. “The days of just telling someone to do something is over. There needs to be a reason behind it, and they have to understand why it needs to be done. It can’t just be I’m telling them to do it. If they understand why to do it, then they will do it again. They are going to have to do it instinctively because I can’t always be there, telling them what to do.”

Quinn’s work with BU’s Avalanche prospects earned him a head coaching opportunity with their AHL affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio, the Lake Erie Monsters. His developmental coaching philosophy led to success on that level as well, with the team amassing a 115-94-20 record over his three seasons. In 2012, Quinn was tapped to become fellow BU alum Joe Sacco’s assistant coach with the home club.

But college coaching, and the chance to succeed a man who came through for him when he needed it most, drew him back to Boston after just a year in the big leagues. Quinn enjoys being there for young men during a time when they are trying to figure out exactly how hockey is going to fit into the bigger picture of their lives.

“There are a lot of things going on in their lives,” says Someone might be having a girlfriend problem, which – people may laugh at that, but hey, they’re kids,” says Quinn. “They are emotional, they are probably having the first serious relationship of their lives. Or something may be going on with their family. Or they might be struggling with school. So when they are struggling or not grasping what you’re telling them, you have to do a little digging and see what’s going on.”

Quinn’s sincerity and experience will serve him well as he steps into a head coaching role that it seems like his entire career has been building towards. While his goal is to maintain the strong tradition of BU’s hockey success, he also hopes to create successful men off the ice.

“I would love them to love me when they’re here, but if they don’t, they love me a lot more when they’re 25, and then I think we’ve done a good job.”

Kat Cornetta