Wittenberg Baseball and Softball To Be Heard On 89.1 WUSO-FM Radio and on World Wide Web

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio - Selected Wittenberg University baseball and softball games can be heard this spring on WUSO-FM, the student-run campus radio station that can be found at the 89.1 frequency in the Springfield area. The first games will be carried on the station's airwaves this weekend as the Tiger baseball team travels to Wabash College for an important North Coast Athletic Conference West Division series. It is a four-game series that includes doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday, beginning at noon each day in Crawfordsville, Ind.

Wittenberg baseball games previously have been carried on commercial stations in the Springfield area, most recently on WULM-AM. But the station's decision not to carry women's basketball games during the 2003-04 season led to the decision to move all Wittenberg athletic broadcasts to the student station for at least the remainder of this school year.

Scott Leo, who has worked the sidelines for Wittenberg football broadcasts the last four years and has been the Voice of the Tiger Women's Basketball team the last three years, will call all the baseball and softball action. Students will join the broadcasts as well, whenever their academic schedules permit.

Wittenberg fans have been able to listen to athletic broadcasts free of charge throughout the 2003-04 school year thanks to an agreement with Stretch Internet, which utilizes QuickTime, Apple's premiere multimedia suite of products. Listeners need only to download the free QuickTime Player (it's already installed on most computers sold in the last two years), and they're ready to listen to Wittenberg games live. QuickTime has already reached more than 100 million MacIntosh and PC users and works just like other popular multimedia applications such as Windows Media Player or Real Player.

The service has been partially funded by gifts from alumni who are members of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. Alumni of this former Wittenberg fraternity mobilized last summer to help make this partnership possible.

At least 24 Tiger baseball games and 10 Tiger softball games will be aired by WUSO. Also on the schedule are NCAC tournament games May 1-2 for the softball team and May 1-2 and 8-9 for the baseball team, but Wittenberg must finish in the top four during the regular season in both sports to qualify for those championship tournaments. In addition, time conflicts may arise.