ALUMNI/AE PROFILE: HOWARD MEGDAL '07

Boosterism is an occupational hazard for all sports announcers. They have been known to gaze upon roiling, wine-dark seas and report back descriptions of rosy-fingered dawns. So Howard Megdal ’07—“the Voice of Bard Athletics”—could be forgiven his ardently sunny outlook on the future of Raptor teams. But there’s a catch. He really believes it. “I’m very optimistic about what I see here,” Megdal says, as he drives north under a Hudson River School sky to cover a weekend of women’s soccer in Annandale.

A close follower of Bard sports for nearly 25 years, Megdal’s vision goes deeper than the wins and losses that inevitably stand as proxies for the merits of any program. “We have a chance to take what’s best about today’s intercollegiate athletics and incorporate that into what has always made Bard a great place to be,” he adds.

Around the turn of the millennium, in one of the old Ravine House dorm rooms now lost to time, Megdal listened (via RealAudio and a dial-up connection) to Vin Scully calling Los Angeles Dodger games from Chávez Ravine, and wondered why Bard’s basketball games were not broadcast on the college’s radio station. Why? led to Why not?, which led to an Athletic Department office with a view of the basketball court and a landline. Megdal could then call the radio station from that office, run to the station (in the basement of Manor House), answer the phone and place the receiver next to an open mic, then hustle back to the gym before tip-off. Voilà! Sports broadcasting at Bard was born.

This can-do spirit has served Megdal well since leaving Bard in 2002 (a few credits shy of a literature degree he would complete in 2007). Undeterred by the prospect of joining an industry beset by consolidation, layoffs, and woeful earnings forecasts, Megdal became a newspaper reporter at the Hudson Register-Star. Not because it was the sensible thing to do, but because, he confesses, “I did not want to do anything else.”

In addition to feeding his obsessions, Megdal’s oeuvre reveals a belief that sports inhabits a crucial place in the broader culture, particularly when it can push back against stereotypes and received wisdom. The canard that certain peoples are not terribly athletic led to the 2009 publication of The Baseball Talmud, Megdal’s position-by-position guide to baseball’s greatest Jewish players.

More recently, his frustration with what he calls “the yawning gap between how men’s and women’s sports are covered” prompted Megdal to launch a website/newsletter called “The IX” (as in Title IX, the landmark 1972 law prohibiting discrimination by sex at any school receiving federal funds). Megdal envisions “The IX” as part of a “new infrastructure that will help tell the stories that need to be told” about women athletes. “The Next,” a women’s basketball newsroom, is also part of that infrastructure. “I love women’s sports because they are so passionate about it,” he says. “The stakes are higher for them because they are pushing back on stereotypes and changing the way we think about women and sports.”

Athletic competition is always an expression of hope, and the prerequisite for hope is uncertainty. The race does typically go to the swiftest, but everyone is even at the start line (unlike in so much of life). It’s no wonder that a lifelong New York Mets fan like Megdal would be so relentlessly optimistic about Bard’s 200 or so varsity athletes. In the words of Mets reliever Tug McGraw, “You Gotta Believe!”

—Bob Barry ’79

You can hear Megdal singing Raptors’ praises on live streams throughout the year at bardathletics.com.