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Growing up with two seasoned sports journalists, Arden Louchheim was practically raised in the broadcast booth. Now a student in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, she was ready to chase her own moment.
When she saw a last-minute opportunity to call the Las Vegas Bowl for the @90.3krnu student radio station, Louchheim ended up asking for more from her parents than just advice.
“I was going to be in Phoenix already for a tournament,” said Louchheim, a student athlete on the Husker Women's Golf team and regular KRNU broadcaster, “so I texted my professor, Bill Doleman, just to ask what the odds were that I could go down and call game for KRNU since I was so close.”
Doleman ran with the idea, working with College of Journalism and Mass Communications staff to get KRNU accredited and send Louchheim off with the proper gear for the broadcast. When Louchheim was unable to find another student to call the game, she turned to the next available sports journalist for a broadcast partner: her dad.
“We’ve always talked about calling a game together — it’s kind of been a big dream of ours forever, but we never really saw how we could make it happen," Louchheim said.
The radio voice for the Utah Jazz, Louchheim’s father David Locke worked the bowl game broadcast — and his Husker football homework — into his tight professional schedule between NBA games.
“He thinks very highly of all my peers that I usually call games with and sees the amount of work they put in, so he didn't want to let any of them down,” Louchheim said. “He and I both very much viewed it as a professional job.”
A professional job required a professional spotter — someone who supports the on-air broadcasters — so the pair naturally brought in Louchheim’s mother, a former sports journalist in Seattle, to fill the role. A veteran of the Seattle professional sports beat before retiring when she had a child, Louchheim's mother Akemi Louchheim has been a continued influence on her development as a journalist.
"Watching old videos of my mom and talking with her helps me a lot," Louchheim said. "Sideline hits, where you only have 30 seconds to give your story, are the thing I'm most nervous about. She's been great at giving me different cues to help my personality come through, like telling me to pretend I'm telling the story to her. Picturing my mom behind the camera has been a really cool trick I've used."
In the booth with both her parents in Las Vegas, the insights kept coming.
“It was so amazing because they could give me feedback in real time during breaks," she said. "I’ve listened to my dad on the radio my whole life, but actually broadcasting with him was such a cool learning experience.”
While it was all business on the air, it was another thing when the game clock hit zero.
“We’re both big saps — the second the game ended we both took off our headsets and started crying.”
