WANTED in Greenville, North Carolina: somewhere the WCHL van can park and broadcast the pre-game show live before the Tar Heels take on East Carolina Saturday afternoon.

This is getting funny.

dowdy-ficklenI have now talked to about a dozen ECU fans and businessmen, some of whom are actually UNC alumni (and root for the Tar Heels when they aren’t playing the Pirates), and I have yet to find somewhere to set up our remote broadcast adjacent to Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium!

I kid you not.

“It’s just not a good business decision,” said one of these sometime-Tar Heels. “With all the social media out there, we just don’t think it would be in our best interest.”

Whoa!

Anthony Wellman (our crack engineer) and I plan to drive the van down to Greenville, put up our 6 x 6 tent, fire up the generator and connect with the studio – three and a half hours before the 3:30 game! Parking passes aren’t available for such a thing because the East Carolina multi-media rights holder (IMG Sports) controls every space in every parking lot around the Stadium.

Hello there, we want to promote you!

We want to capture the atmosphere of what should be a great day of college football, talk to some Pirate fans and Tar Heels who walk by, and interview a guest or two from East Carolina, like their basketball coach Jeff Lebo (who just happened to be an All-ACC player for this Carolina back in the 1980s!). As of now, we can’t get a spot within a mile of campus, and I can’t ask Lebo to come to us!

That’s the point.

We want to send back to our audience what a great pre-game atmosphere they have at East Carolina games – better than in Chapel Hill because of how their stadium is situated compared to ours. I’ve said dozens of times over the years that the pre-game Pirate party is among the best in the country, and that’s what we want to talk about.

From the outskirts of Greenville, though, there’s not much of a party going on.

Maybe we’ll work it out. Some of the sometime Heels have been helpful by giving us the names and numbers of other people to call. It’s like, “Okay, but not in my backyard!”

Henry Hinton, the radio impresario in Greenville and a former general manager of WCHL whose all-sports FM in Greenville actually carries UNC games, asked me this week, “What if Pirate Radio wanted to set up outside the stadium in Chapel Hill?”

“I don’t know, Henry,” I said. “My guess is that half the people walking by wouldn’t give a damn and the other half would say, “Welcome to Chapel Hill. Y’all have a great game!”

That is the attitude I have seen grow here for years now, since we played at Notre Dame in 2006 and were impressed with how many people greeted us before the game with a “Welcome to Notre Dame!” Since then, several community-oriented Chapel Hill residents actually print up signs that say, “Welcome, Pirates!” and “Welcome, Hokies!” and hand them out to local businesses. And most of those signs go up in the windows the weekend of the game.

Yet WCHL can’t even broadcast a pre-game show from inside the atmosphere that East Carolina should be so proud of?

Doesn’t make any sense, but Anthony and I are still working on it. Maybe we’ll end up close enough to hear the roar of the crowd!

If you have anything to add or know where there’s a good parking spot near the stadium, tell me in the comments below.