Voice of the Scorpions seeks volunteers to help in the booth during season’s games

John “J.J.” O’Brien has been the voice of fall sports at Sedona Red Rock High School for more than 20 years. He’ll lend his dulcet tones once again as the Scorpions football season kicks off tonight, serving as the public address announcer.

O’Brien is also looking for volunteers to help make the season a success.

“I’m looking forward to seeing harder play and more knowledge of the game than last year’s team. That was a very new group, bringing in all these new players who’d never played tackle football before,” O’Brien said.

“We’re a young team, and we’re new, so if we can get a couple of wins, that would be incredible. But I don’t think that’s the main focus for the coaching staff or for me. It’s about having fun, improving, getting better and having the discipline to do it all.”

A typical Friday night for O’Brien is him arriving an hour before kick to research the rosters, do a sound and time check and go over the pronunciation of the players names with their coaches.

“I want to make it as professional as I can,” O’Brien said. “I want to have a good time, not be too serious, but really it’s all about the student athletes and making sure they get their names pronounced correctly and loudly on the loudspeaker. I think it brings joy to those kids, and that’s what I want to do.”

O’Brien got started doing play-by-play in 1999 after getting a call from his friend Steve DeVol.

“[DeVol] started a TV station called the Sedona Channel that morphed into the Arizona Channel. He wanted to tape all the Scorpion football games, and out of the blue he asked, ‘Hey, would you want to be the play-by-play person?’” O’Brien said. “I had never done anything like that before, but I thought, well, sure, I know a lot about sports.”

For the next two years, O’Brien said they would tape the Friday night Scorpion football games and broadcast them on Saturdays, and the same for the 2000-2001 basketball season, until the venture came to an end because there was not “enough sponsorship money to keep it afloat.”

In 2005, O’Brien took over as the public address announcer for Scorpion football games, and has since been announcing the volleyball program along with both varsity basketball programs.

“I’ve emceed the school’s sports banquets several times over the years,” O’Brien said. “I’ve been on the Hall of Fame committee since it started helping to pick athletes at the high school” for induction.

Many sports broadcasters has a catchphrase from “Holy Cow” bellowed by legendary baseball broadcaster Harry Caray or “What a maneuver” from Vince McMahon during the golden age of professional wrestling. But O’Brien said, for him, it varies but sport.

“I don’t know if I have a catchphrase,” he said. “For football, I do — it’s ‘another Scorpion first down.’ I do my threepoint yell when they hit a three-point shot in basketball. I don’t know if I have a signature thing for volleyball, but I just love announcing the lineups. I make a big deal when someone gets an ace or gets a kill at the net and spikes it really well.”

For those wanting to help the Scorpion football program O’Brien said that he is in need of a spotter and timekeeper during an October home game, additionally Head Coach Tony Hauserman is in need of volunteers for the chain gang that measures and moves the yardage for the team on offense.

“When I’m in the booth, I’ve got the roster in front of me for both teams. Typically, I’ll take the offense, and my spotter will follow the play with his binoculars and figure out who made the tackle,” O’Brien said. “The spotter just yells out the number, and then I go to the roster and know who made the tackle and announce it.”

All roles have a time commitment of 6 to about 9:30 p.m. on average.

“It’s a great time. You get to see a side of Sedona that you don’t typically get to see — Friday Night Lights football, a smalltown feel,” O’Brien said. “It’s a lot of fun, and you … get to help out the kids, the student athletes, the high school and the whole community by volunteering.”

Contact O’Brien at 928-451-2265 or jinsedona@aol.com for more information about spotting or being a timekeeper. Contact Hauserman at tony@egismail.com for more information about volunteering on the chain gang.

Additionally, several coaching jobs in the Sedona-Oak Creek School District are posted at sedonacreek.tedk12.com/hire/index.asp.