Unlike a child who grows bored with a toy after a day or two, the folks at Bangor sports radio station WZON (620 AM) haven’t even begun to play with the one the University of Maine presented to them last Friday.

“What we’re really excited about is we’ve worked really hard to get ourselves in position to this and we finally have,” said station general manager Chris Spruce.

Five days after being awarded exclusive radio rights to UMaine sports for the next three years, Sports Zone officials are still in the preliminary stages of planning their coverage strategy.

“We have absolutely not talked about what we’re going to do yet,” said program director Dale Duff. “One of the primary problems is we don’t even have [Maine fall and winter] schedules yet.”

Of primary concern to officials at UMaine and WZON, and the listening public, is the possibility of scheduling conflicts limiting live coverage of UM’s major sports.

“I’m fairly confident that the conflicts may be less in number than people expect,” said Spruce. “What we tried to do in regard to the bid process was throw out some possibilities on how to approach potential conflicts. Now that we have the contract, we’re obviously going to try and explore these possibilities.”

Those possibilities include live updates from secondary game sites, late games joined in progress after the early ones finish, tape-delayed coverage, and arranging for other stations to broadcast games conflicting with a Maine game broadcast by WZON.

“We’re certainly open to all kinds of ideas. Tape-delay is not as likely only because we’ve only done it once and that was after we ran the men’s basketball game from Alaska live at an unusually late time,” Spruce explained.

Duff and Spruce would like to see adjustments in the schedules so WZON could air almost all of both games whenever a Maine men’s and women’s game coincided.

Duff said as little as a half-hour difference between starting times would make a huge difference in coverage capability.

“Let’s say it’s Thursday and the men are home and the women are on the road. You tip one at 7 p.m. and the other starts around 7:40 p.m.,” explained Duff. “I don’t know we would necessarily start the play-by-play on the second game as it began, but we could set the scene and then go to the end of that game – while there’s still most of the second half to be played – after the first game ended.”

Both Duff and Spruce cautioned it’s too early to get specific.

“Until we get there, we’re kind of talking through our hats,” said Spruce.

ESPN’s Scholastic Sports America show will run a locally produced segment about the recently concluded Eastern Maine high school basketball tournaments.

The segment was produced and submitted to ESPN by Rich Chrampanis, the sports director at WVII-TV (Channel 7) in Bangor.

Chrampanis’ audio narration will not be heard, however. Instead, Scholastic Sports host Melissa Stark will present the piece, which is scheduled to air at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, April 7.

Judging from a crammed 1997 TV baseball, networks appear to be trying to make up for lost Major League Baseball coverage (remember The Baseball Network?) over the last few years.

The latest case in point: New England Sports Network is supplementing its traditional Boston Red Sox coverage with 25 regionally exclusive Thursday games.

As part of a joint venture with FOX Sports Net, the FOX Network’s new all-sports network, NESN will air its first “Baseball Thursday” game (Chicago at Florida) tonight as part of a twi-night TV doubleheader. Boston’s game at Anaheim follows at 10:05 p.m.