Coastal viewers enjoying their ‘Sports Nuts’ Fast-paced cable program has large fan base

The title of the show pretty much tells you all you need to know about the weekly television program hosted by longtime Kennebec and Knox County residents Mark Strong, Steve Hiller, and Dennis Wooster.

It’s called “Sports Nuts” and the hour-long program covering local and national sports topics and personalities airs on Adelphia Cable’s Knox County public access station, Channel 58.

“When we first started, they told us we’d have trouble filling an hour, so they wanted to start with a half hour,” said Strong, the show’s host as well as president of the Strong insurance agency, longtime JV boys basketball coach at Georges Valley High School in Thomaston, and a high school and youth baseball umpire.

“We had no trouble filling that, so we quickly went to an hour. It flies right by because we keep it going pretty quickly,” Strong added.

Just about any topic even remotely related to sports is fair game on the show, which has generated a large, loyal following since it first aired almost two years ago on Channel 9, another local access channel.

“Steve and I have known each other quite awhile. He’s been an assistant for me with Little League and JV,” Strong said. “We were coming back from a game one night and were talking about how we thought this area needed a show like this because there’s so much interest in sports around here.”

Hiller, who owns Southend Grocery in Rockland, also coaches JV sports at Georges Valley.

The show follows a traditional format starting with an introduction, an announcement of the week’s guest, and a local sports scores/highlights segment followed by NASCAR racing news. After a commercial break, longtime high school basketball and baseball coach Buddy Wood hosts a professional sports segment.

“Well, we don’t say he knows anything about it. He just talks about it,” Strong said with a hearty laugh.

Wood’s segment is followed by an interview with the weekly guest before ending the show with a trivia segment hosted by Wooster, a coach and umpire from Warren.

The show, which is taped each Sunday morning, has attracted a wide range of guests from coaches to high school and college players to upcoming personalities such as world-ranked senior Samba competitor Chico Hernandez and Maine Survivor (Marquesas) contestant Zoe Zanidakis.

The show’s primary broadcasts are Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7 p.m., but is shown as many as 16 times per week. It can make for a somewhat surreal experience for Strong and his family.

“I try not to watch and my wife tries to avoid it as much as possible,” he said with a chuckle.

Ratings bonanza

The Internet numbers are in and officials at all-sports Bangor radio station WZON couldn’t be happier.

Program director and morning host Dale Duff could barely contain his enthusiasm as he shared some early April numbers from The Sports Zone’s Zoneradio.com Internet broadcasts.

“We looked at some of our ratings numbers and that [Frozen] Four Thursday, the 24-hour period of April 4, we had slightly over 14,000 hours logged in on our site for the Internet broadcast of the Maine game by 8,000 unique listeners at various computers around the world,” Duff explained.

By way of comparison, WZON’s numbers for March – which was a record-breaking month for Internet hits – Zoneradio.com’s streaming broadcasts were logged onto for more than 28,000 hours.

“Yeah, so on one day in April, we logged half as many hours as we did the entire month of March,” Duff said.

Information overload

Last weekend’s NFL Draft broadcast effort by ESPN and ESPN2, although fairly complete, could stand to be reined in a bit, especially in terms of the glut of on-screen graphics and “crawls” used during the two-day broadcast.

Everything was thrust at viewers, from a pick-by-pick crawl (ticker) at the bottom of the screen, to instant poll information, to draft trivia, to “current selection” pop-up bulletins, to Mel Kiper’s best athletes available, to listings of the NFL’s new divisional alignments…. Whew. The worst was a still-confusing bar on the left side of the screen with abbreviated team names. All of it made you want to grab some Visine and put drops in bloodshot eyes after just an hour of viewing.

If anything, the 16-hour broadcast proved there is such a thing as too much information.

Andrew Neff can be reached at 990-8205 or at aneff@bangordailynews.net.