It’s 10:30 p.m. on March 6 in Birmingham, Ala.

Valdosta State radio announcer Mike Chason sits at a desk with papers splayed out from one side to the other in a seventh floor, King’s suite at the Homewood Suites in Downtown Birmingham.

Chason is poring over his game notes prior to the Blazers’ Gulf South Conference tournament semifinal game against West Alabama. He’ll do only an hour before watching the Los Angeles Lakers-Milwaukee Bucks game on a swanky flat-screen TV in a king-sized bed. He’ll do two more hours of prep work the next morning over his usual road game breakfast of a waffle, eggs and a single cup of coffee.

“I like consistency,” he says, adjusting his glasses.

Chason has been the radio voice of the Blazers since 1990 – 30 years on the call for one of the top Division II programs in the country.

The year Chason started on the radio, the Blazers were not broadcasting games at all. That is, until Chason and then-head coach James Dominey got to talking about how to get the Blazers on the air. Dominey offered to help Chason round up sponsors, while Chason paid for radio time at a local Valdosta radio station.

“I just did the home games because I was still working full-time as director of public relations at ABAC,” Chason recalled. “We got those games on the air and then the next year, he said let’s go a step further, let’s get all the games on the air. Charles Cooper was the head coach of the women’s team and he was having great success, and so I started doing women’s games as well when we played doubleheaders in the league.”

In the summer of 1979, Chason was in a Dale Carnegie class at ABAC when a gentleman by the name of Ralph Edwards – the owner of WWGS in Tifton – told him, “I want to do something for ABAC and I want to do something for you.”

“What is that, Mr. Edwards?” Chason asked.

“I want to put all the ABAC basketball games on my radio station and I want you to do the play-by-play,” Edwards declared.

Chason told Edwards he’d never done play-by-play before, but Edwards said he was “convinced you could do it.”

Edwards’ confidence in him was the start of Chason’s 40-plus-year career in radio.

“I’ll never forget the first game – ABAC and Brewton-Parker up in Mount Vernon, Ga. – I don’t have a tape of that game, but I’m sure it wasn’t very good (laughs).” Chason said. “That started me doing the games and then in 1984, I started doing Tift County High School football on the air along with some Tift County High School basketball and continued to do the ABAC games.

“Then in 1990, with no Valdosta State games on the air, my alma mater, that’s when James and I got together and were able to get the games on the air, so from 1990 to 2020, here we are 30 years later – it doesn’t seem like 30 years, but I’ve called a lot of games in those 30 years for the flame red and black. I’ve enjoyed all of them. It’s more enjoyable when we win and we win a lot.”

The Blazers knocked off the Tigers 85-71 the next night to advance to GSC Championship game against rival Alabama-Huntsville.

When he first started calling games on the radio, his now colorful, signature hummingbird in a wind tunnel style wasn’t yet developed. Looking back, Chason admits his style lent itself more to TV than the left end of your radio dial.

“I had never been a big listener on the radio to play-by-play broadcasters type of person because, like most people, I watched them on TV,” Chason said. “My style was much more TV-based – in other words, I didn’t try to fill every single second. I taped every game, and after every game, I played it back and I realized for radio I needed a much more uptempo style. So, since I had the games by myself, when we got the games on the air, that was about as much as we could afford. I couldn’t afford to pay a color commentator. I started filling in the gaps and then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just fill in all the gaps.’ So it was continuous talking the entire time I was on the air.

“Of course, there were interviews in there, which is always good. It breaks it up and I loved doing the games by myself because it allows me to prepare and all this material that I have, I can put into the broadcast. I love giving people information. The main thing is what the score is, how much time is left, what’s the significance of this basketball game and to me, if a person just riding by in their car and they’re just tuning in and they say, ‘I wonder what the score is.’ Immediately, I need to tell them the score and how much time is left in the game.”

Chason’s love for giving people information is no accident. He was a sports writer at The Valdosta Daily Times in 1974 and became the sports editor in 1976.

His time as a journalist helped him stay on task, delivering the details deftly without distraction. Listening to him call games, you can feel him crafting the game in real time for anyone within earshot.

Often, Chason sprinkles in a few catchphrases. “The orange pumpkin went up and over the orange rim and down into the white nylons,” he likes to say on a made basket.

“It’s all about, what Larry Munson would say, painting the picture,” Chason said of his vibrant catchphrases. “It’s interesting to have parents of players, some of those from Sweden or all across the United States that’ll occasionally attend the games and see their son or daughter play. They’d say, ‘Oh, I could just imagine myself being there,’ and that’s my point – to make the person listening on the radio or the internet feel just like they’re there and what color socks the players are wearing and how many people are in the arena and is it cold outside and what’s it actually like being here because they’re in another place. If I’m not talking, nobody’s talking. It’s just dead space, so I try to fill all the gaps.”