By DJ John O

A member of the WUSB staff since the fall of 1983, Matt Mankiewich joined the WUSB Sports Department the following spring after completing training. (Incidentally, Matt has been highly involved in training at WUSB for decades). At around the same time, Dave Vallone and Dave Molow joined up and formed the core of the WUSB sports department for the next two decades. All were SBU students at that time, and both Matt and Vallone would serve as sports director, a position held primarily by current students. In addition to the weekly show, the department has been airing Stony Brook Patriots and Seawolves games to the present day. Sometime in the ‘90s, Jeff Bernstein and Curt Hylton joined the WUSB sports staff and became long-time fixtures at the station themselves.

The Sports Section has been in its current Sunday at 10 pm slot since 1981. Originally hosted by Tony White and Mike Borg, it predates WFAN, which started in 1987. It was inspired by the Sunday night sports shows hosted by Len Berman, George Michael and Bill Mazer, which did a rundown of the previous week, featuring interviews and in-depth discussions. WUSB’s program originally ran for one hour and expanded to two hours in 1992.

It was not the very first sports show on WUSB, however. Matt recalls seeing the very first WUSB program guide from 1977 that featured a show called the Sports Huddle. Other than Lister’s Saturday afternoon reggae program, though, the Sunday night show could be the longest-running show at WUSB in the same time slot.

Matt, both Daves, Jeff and Curt all stayed on after graduation and spent many a Sunday night on the show together. A typical show would have a first hour focused on Seawolf sports with the second hour featuring the latest New York professional sport stories. During the summer, which is the college sports off-season, the conversations usually are about the Mets and Yankees, then the football training camps starting in late July. The crew has been well known for their on-air skirmishes, most famously about a possible acquisition of Danny Manning by the Knicks and again over an electronic strike zone in MLB. While the heat of these discussions was high so was the entertainment quotient.

And with as many as five people on at a time, it can sometimes get confusing, so not all of them will jump in simultaneously. Matt, for example, concentrates on Stony Brook men’s lacrosse and baseball on the air, so he might leave the Seawolves football and basketball discussions to the rest of the group. Although, when the subject is NHL hockey, he’ll be right back at the forefront. Other crew members will do likewise depending on what they might have witnessed during the week.

The show has even featured interviews with Yankee notables like Fritz Peterson and Tommy Henrich, not to mention hundreds of University student-athletes and coaches, and quite a few beat writers and sports columnists like Matt’s high school buddy Mike Vaccaro. Well aware of the limited coverage the Seawolves get off-campus, the crew has always spent a lot of time covering the programs whose games are also aired on WUSB, like football, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s lacrosse, and baseball. At different times, they have hosted additional shows like “Athletic Direction” before games and “Seawolves Night Live” on Monday nights, spotlighting Stony Brook players and coaches even more so than the Sunday show.

As much as Seawolves sports coverage has been a staple at WUSB, it was never more so than the spring of 2012, when Stony Brook’s baseball team made a run to the College World Series, with Matt at play by play. For someone who has been covering the local professional teams as a reporter for nearly a quarter of a century, working for Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League at different times, it remains his greatest thrill in sports.

“Eight World Series, five Stanley Cup Finals, three NBA Finals, various NFL playoff runs, and still none of them come close to seeing your alma mater at the pinnacle and being directly involved,” Matt remembers. “I drive people crazy still talking about it eight years later, and I can only wish our current people get a shot at something like that.”

The continued in-depth coverage is one of the things Matt is proud of in recent years. Another is the increased participation of students in both game broadcasts and the Sports Section. As Jeff and Curt took on expanded roles in the Athletic Department, the WUSB Sports Department was left to Matt to develop a new student crew, which proved to be a success. Every student who joins the department has the opportunity to participate in a variety of roles, and Matt makes sure they get their reps on the air. Gaetan Fleuretin was this past year’s undergraduate student sports director and served with the student e-board to handle administrative/management needs and engineering of games.

“The only way you get better on the air is doing it over and over again,” Matt says, “and I make it a priority to get everyone opportunities at play by play and color. We’ll get them comfortable talking on the Sports Section first, then we’ll give them structure working on updates during games and as they get more familiar with the teams, they find out talking about them is pretty easy. It’s the off-air prep that takes so much time. But you can hear the growth every time you listen.”

And while the current on-air crew of Zach Wilson, Jim Ferchland, Ken Fermin and Joe Soccoa hasn’t had the opportunity to see their teams go all the way yet, they’ve had some magical moments to call particularly with the football and women’s lacrosse teams.“As the ad campaign says, priceless,” says Matt.

Despite the great love the WUSB sports department has shown to the University sports program, it has sometimes been unrequited. After the recent arrival of associate AD Adam Rubin, things have gotten significantly better, as Matt has a prior relationship with him when both covered the Mets (something Matt has done for 24 years professionally). With the hundreds of hours of WUSB Seawolves’ sports programming each year, the symbiotic relationship between the station and the sports department is of great benefit to both entities as well as the many Stony Brook fans who listen to WUSB for their coverage.

After decades of covering Stony Brook sports, Matt has brought another of his passions to the WUSB airwaves. His love of cars has prompted him to develop a show called “Flywheel” airing alternate Saturday mornings from 9 to 10 am. The name was inspired by a cobbled-up magazine circulated by British prisoners of war held captive in Germany in World War II. Its motto was “Keep the works going round on the idle strokes,” a call to keep the enthusiast faith during that idle time, a point Matt finds particularly relevant during this time of quarantine.

His co-host is Mark and they wax poetic about cars new and old and all aspects of them. For nearly two years they have gotten into the real nitty gritty of car repair and car ownership. They try to explain to the audience some of the information that might sail over their heads when they hear if from the service manager at the local dealership, something Matt calls “car-splaining.” Both of them love cars and enjoy working on them as well. Matt grew up with GM cars and has become more familiar with BMW and Chrysler products. Mark, on the other hand, has a fondness for Mercedes, Volvos and Volkswagens with a more recent fascination with electric cars.

Unlike a show like “Car Talk” that is as much about jokes as it is about Fords and Mazdas, Matt and Mark get into great detail about the finer points of the vehicles they discuss as well their history, both the good and the bad. Listening to their show, I was brought back to the many Saturday afternoons I spent working on Pintos, Colts and Oldsmobiles, setting points and checking timing. But you don’t need to know the difference between a distributor and a head gasket to get the enthusiasm and expertise that the two gents have for the automobiles that many of us have come to take for granted in this age of cookie-cutter vehicles. If you have any interest in the workings of the internal combustion engine, “Flywheel” is a Saturday morning hour well spent.

DJ John O - Salvage & Recovery Radio - Monday nights 8 to 10 pm

Matt Mankiewich and the Sports Section crew can be heard Sunday nights from 10 pm to 12 am and Matt and Mark can be heard on the Flywheel alternating Saturday mornings at 9 am. See www.WUSB.fm for more details

Editor's Note : WUSB Sports department is always looking for additional studio engineering staff and interns as well as people to train for on air and on the field announcing. For more information about joining WUSB sports department email info@wusb.fm