Shawn Tiemann takes the mic

The first thing to know about the new voice of the Lady Griz? He's a crier. Or, as he says it, he wears his emotions on his sleeve.

Shawn Tiemann lost it four times during an interview on Wednesday in the Sky Club, while the Grizzly men's basketball team was providing background on the court of Dahlberg Arena below. Four times!

He couldn't keep it together when talking about Rogers State men's basketball coach Justin Barkley or about the positive feedback he's received over the years from fans of the Great Falls Voyagers.

The opportunity to be the voice of a Division I basketball team, a dream he held near and dear to his heart for nearly four decades, since listening to Missouri games on KMOX back in his hometown of St. Louis while growing up?

One can only imagine what races through his head. All the moves, all the sacrifices, all the games called, all for an aspiration now realized.

More tears.

But those are nothing compared to what follows, when he's asked the question that sends him behind the bar of the Sky Club, looking for something, anything. A towel maybe. Those earlier tears were just a start. A tissue isn't going to suffice this time.

Tiemann is married, you see. Has a son who is a freshman in high school, who loves baseball and the alto sax. But they aren't here in Missoula. His family is in Tulsa, Okla. He lives there too, when he's not out chasing this passion of his for calling games.

"If I didn't have a love for play-by-play, I wouldn't keep doing it," he says. "But it's become what I do. It's who I am."

He's asked about it, how he spent summers from 2013 to '19 calling minor league baseball games in Texas, Iowa, Missouri and Montana, his family back in Oklahoma.

How they gave him the freedom to chase this latest opportunity, the chance to be the voice of a Division I program 1,500 miles away. What family does that, he's asked? He loses it.

"They are my world. They are my lifeblood," he says. "Broadcasting games is my passion, but they sustain me. I ask them over and over, are you okay with this?"

Working for the Laredo Lemurs for no pay. Sioux City, then Joplin, then Great Falls from 2016 to '19, the voice of the Voyagers, all for a chance to be around his first love: baseball.

Thirteen years of bus trips with the Rogers State men's and women's basketball teams.

"Go do it. You will not be your full self unless you're doing that. That they would let me have that kind of leash, it takes my breath away," he says.

Call it earned, perhaps payback for a sacrifice once made for Lorena Rivas, whom he met in Woodward, Okla., not long after he took a radio job in the city as a news and sports director.

He was just following the advice -- life-altering as he describes it -- he'd received from Jim Holder, a member of the St. Louis Radio Hall of Fame.

Tiemann had started his career, after graduating from Missouri-St. Louis, in Taylorville, Ill., but he'd quit after 11 months to return to St. Louis. He thought, in that market, that a play-by-play job would fall in his lap.

Holder told him, If you want to do play-by-play, take a job that allows you to do it. Go where they'll let you do it. "It's in my brain to this day," Tiemann says.

That's why he took the job in Woodward in 2001. They were going to let him do it. Mostly high school. Some American Legion baseball.

"I was going to take it no matter what it paid, no matter what the other job duties were because it allowed me to do play-by-play," says Tiemann, who was there four-plus years.

"That's where I really sunk my teeth into play-by-play. I didn't quite develop into the play-by-play guy that I've become, but it put me a lot closer."

During his stop in Woodward, he and Rivas not only met but got married.

"Those years were pretty productive from a broadcast standpoint. From a life standpoint, I met my wife there, so that was a big stop for me in my life and my career," he says.

They moved to Hays, Kan., for a job that allowed him to break into college sports, as the sideline reporter for Fort Hays State football games, while his prep resume kept expanding. He called games for both Hays High and Thomas More Prep.

After two years in Hays and the completion of the necessary degrees, Lorena had her own dream: law school.

With a job lined up at Sports Animal Tulsa, one that did not promise much in the way of play-by-play opportunities, Tiemann put his passion on hold so Lorena could pursue hers. They moved back to Oklahoma so she could start at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

When they first met, back in Woodward, Tiemann told Rivas about his love of calling games on the radio. She didn't laugh. She didn't diminish it. Quite the opposite.

"A person is nothing without their vision and dreams. It was the thing that made him feel most alive," she says. "I committed at that time to always be supportive of this passion of his.

"Luckily his radio career brought me the ability to go to law school and find my own passion. He was very supportive of my dreams of being a lawyer."

She became a practicing lawyer in 2012. Today she runs Rivas and Associates, an immigration law firm in Tulsa.

"I've since further discovered my passion and mission in my life of empowering immigrants," says Rivas, a first-generation Mexican-American.

"It is integral to my life. Shawn has that same obsession with his career. I want to ensure he never thinks twice about continuing with his life mission of calling games."

Somewhere in Missoula, where he arrived this week, Tiemann is in need of another towel, knowing a truer, purer partnership in marriage has rarely existed.

Is it easy? No. Do they make it work, two people pursuing their passions, always tethered together, even from a distance? Yes.

We ask of the athletes we follow and the coaches who lead them both sacrifice and emotional investment. We want to know it means something to them. But our radio guy?

Indeed, it's a new era in Lady Griz basketball.

But what is passion without inspiration? It's a spark, a tiny flame without oxygen, never to become an all-consuming fire.

Tiemann does not remember all the particulars of his first trip to a sporting event, but he can easily recall the emotions he felt at that St. Louis Blues game when he was four or five, seated near the boards, close enough to feel the chill coming off the ice.

But that's not what caused the goosebumps. "That probably set me on a course," he says. "There is nothing that beats being in person."

He went to more Blues games, Cardinals baseball games, the annual Braggin' Rights college basketball game between Missouri and Illinois at the St. Louis Arena each December.

But it was those he did not attend, those he listened to on the radio, that brought him into a new world.

In St. Louis at the time, it didn't get any better. Jack Buck was calling the baseball games that Whitey Herzog's Cardinals were usually winning. There was the World Series title in 1982, World Series appearances in 1985 and '87.

"Baseball is where my passion is," Tiemann says. "If you grow up in St. Louis and you're not a Cardinals fan, it's sacrilege. It's instilled in you. If you want to tug at my heartstrings, just talk Cardinals baseball."

For 21 years during the winters, Canadian-born Dan Kelly was educating St. Louisans on the new sport of hockey that arrived in the city in 1967.

"If you were a sports fan in St. Louis, it was heaven," says Tiemann. "The 80s were a huge influence growing up in St. Louis."

Basketball was introduced on a smaller scale. His dad was from Litchfield, Ill., not far up the road. Over the holidays, Tiemann's grandpa would take him to small-town high-school tournaments.

"He's one of the reasons I love basketball so much. I remember driving through the snow to watch his Litchfield Purple Panthers play. That was my introduction into hoops," he says.

"Baseball was my first love, but my favorite sport to broadcast is basketball. I like the pace of it, the flow of it. There is poetry in the motion of basketball that has always resonated with me."

His friends had cable TV. He grew up without it, and it set him on the path he continues to walk today.

Most nights he would fall asleep with his headphones on, Buck and Kelly taking him to a different place with their voices and their ability to tell a story about the games they were watching for him.

"There was something that resonated so much with me," he says. "I thought that was the coolest job on earth."

Someone would one day describe the experience of radio to Tiemann as "theater of the mind."

"You listen to something on radio, and it can expand your imagination. It can set your mind ablaze. That's what those two guys did," he says.

With the arrival in the 1980s of ESPN, play-by-play guys took on an even larger role. And one school seemed to produce most of them: Syracuse's Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Tiemann applied. He was told he was on the waitlist. His mom questioned the idea of spending $30,000 a year for a school in New York when Missouri-St. Louis had its own mass communications program.

He became a UMSL Riverman. Syracuse later let him know that he had been elevated from the waitlist and accepted. He remained a Riverman.

As a sophomore he interned at 590 The Fan, a sports-talk station in St. Louis. "It was an introduction to the industry. It started fostering my love of radio," Tiemann says.

Then he read about a sportscaster camp on his campus. He grabbed his Radio Shack tape recorder and had a week of bliss: summer-league basketball games, a Fresno State football game off a TV monitor.

Then, the holy grail: getting to attend a Cardinals game and do play-by-play -- again, into a tape recorder that only he would ever hear -- just down the first-base line from where Jack Buck was working.

Ray Lankford hit a home run. Tiemann was all over it. "That lit my fire. Yeah, I probably sounded like I was 12 or 14, but I thought, I can do this," he says.

He graduated, applied for hundreds of jobs, got turned down hundreds of times, until the station in Taylorville, Ill., gave him a chance.

He attended school board meetings, city council meetings, whatever was asked. He didn't care. He had a game of the week as part of his duties. He prepared for it like it was the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Final Four, rolled into one.

Back to St. Louis, then on to Woodward, getting more and more dialed in on his personal style each game he called.

"I'm high-energy, pretty much all the time. I've always had energy to burn. I've funneled that into my play-by-play broadcasts," he says.

"I'm not a wordsmith, necessarily. It can be hard to find the cleverest way to say something when you're on the fly. But if you bring positivity and energy to a broadcast, people are going to tune in.

"Just let your personality come out and do a little theater of the mind."

Rivas entered his life. Xavier entered theirs. They moved to Hays, then on to Tulsa after he got a job at The Sports Animal. They let him call high school football on an AM station the radio group owned.

It wasn't everything. But it was something. "There was no guarantee I would get to do basketball or baseball, but I figured this is the best opportunity," he says.

Then: a break. The program director at The Sports Animal got an email. Rogers State, 30 miles up the road in Claremore, was restarting its basketball programs. Did they have anyone interested in calling their games?

Right place, right time. "I raised my hand. You make your own breaks sometimes in this industry," Tiemann says. "I wanted to be the voice of a college basketball program."

He would be, for the next 13 years, calling games for both the men's and women's teams.

"Maybe three or four or five seasons in, I really started feeling good about my broadcast and what I was putting out there for people. I started coming into my own," he says.

Prior to the 2010-11 season, Justin Barkley was hired as the head men's coach. Seven of the next 10 years -- or Tiemann's last decade on the job -- the Hillcats won 20 or more games, with a 24-6 record last season that ended on the way to the NCAA Central Regional.

It was talking about his relationship with Barkley that first brought Tiemann to tears on Wednesday. He describes himself as fiercely loyal to the programs he covers.

When Lorena finished law school and began her career, Tiemann brought up the idea of pursuing another dream: minor league baseball in the summer. She had three words for him: Go do it.

That led to a summer in Laredo, where he was provided housing but no pay to be the No. 2 guy. But he caught the eye of Dave Nitz, who has called football, men's basketball and baseball games at Louisiana Tech for more than four decades. He's in that school's hall of fame.

Because that wasn't enough, in the summers he moonlighted as play-by-play for the Sioux City Explorers. He recognized Tiemann's work and drive and asked if next season he would want to do it in Sioux City.

"I was paid zero for my work in Laredo, but I was given free housing. That's the story of a lot of broadcasters," Tiemann says.

"But it got me to Sioux City. That was my master's degree in baseball broadcasting. The way he called a game, I just absorbed it."

That led to the job as the broadcaster for the Joplin Blasters the next summer. Finally a job with an affiliated team in 2016, the Great Falls Voyagers.

"I spent the next four summers in Montana. I love this place. I like seeing new places and experiencing new adventures," he says.

Last spring he was sifting through social media and came across a story: a guy named Tom Stage had retired as the voice of the Montana women's basketball program.

His first thought: That's interesting. A week passed. His thoughts changed: Why can't I go get that job?

He had done some work for Learfield in the Tulsa area over the years, so he knew some people. He also knew of Riley Corcoran, Voice of the Griz, so he reached out.

"It took him a while to reply to my email. I figured they had found a local guy. Not that there is anything wrong with that, because there is not," Tiemann says.

Corcoran got back to him, told him it was still ongoing and that they were just trying to find the right fit. Things moved quickly, from Grizzly Sports Properties to Learfield IMG College.

He did some phone interviews. The job was offered. He told them he needed to sleep on it, which wasn't true. He already knew.

"I've always wanted to do college broadcasts, and I've desired for a long time to do Division I, whatever sport that may be," he says. "Being in town now, I'm in awe and taken aback. How did this happen?"

That's no secret. He hustled, for years and years, saying yes to everything he could squeeze into his schedule. A six-man football game in the Texas panhandle? I'll be there.

He studied the work of others to improve his own storytelling. He married a woman who's let him chase his dreams just as he's encouraged her to pursue her own.

That's why he's here. That's why it happened.

"Hopefully I'll broadcast a lot of Lady Griz victories and Big Sky Conference championships for whatever length of time they'll have me. It's an honor and privilege to be granted this opportunity."

He says this, then he begins to cry.

University of Montana Athletics

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