Mark Lazerus: Amin goes from VU to ESPNU

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Updated: November 16, 2011 9:42AM

Here’s what Adam Amin’s schedule looks like this week.

This past Saturday, he took the red-eye from Miami to New Jersey. He then hopped in a car and spent all day Sunday on I-80, driving home to Chicago. After a day off on Monday, he flew to Georgia on Tuesday. He’ll fly back to Chicago this morning, then hop on another flight to Salt Lake City on Friday morning. Then, Sunday morning, it’s back to Chicago.

It’s exhausting just to type it, let alone live it.

“I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” Amin said.

That sounds slightly less crazy — only slightly, mind you — when you realize he’s doing all that travel to call college sporting events for ESPN.

At age 24, the Valparaiso University grad — a familiar voice to Crusaders fans — is already working games on national television. He signed a one-year contract in July to cover a variety of sports, mostly for ESPNU.

And ESPN holds an option to trigger a second year of that contract, so you can be sure Amin’s not about to turn his nose up at any assignment — even if it means a midweek jaunt to the deep South for Wednesday night’s Georgia-Auburn volleyball match, sandwiched between calling the Bethune-Cookman vs. Miami football game last Saturday and the BYU-San Jose State football game this coming Saturday.

“When I was in the process (of negotiating with ESPN), I told my agent, whatever they want me to do, I’ll do,” Amin said. “I consider myself pretty versatile. I’ll do whatever they have for me.”

Actually, he has a background in calling volleyball from his VU days. Basketball, too. And the former VU men’s color analyst and women’s play-by-play man will have a full slate of hoops games — from the Horizon League to the Big Ten to the Big East — come winter.

But football? That’s still sort of new for Amin. While he’s been doing play-by-play for six years now — four years at VU, two summers with the RailCats and the last two years as the play-by-play man for the Somerset Patriots minor-league baseball team (hence the flight to New Jersey, to tie up some loose ends at the end of baseball season there) — his football experience was minimal. He did color for a couple of VU games back in the day, and called four region high school football games after the Patriots season ended last year. Throw in a couple of high school football games in August that started his ESPN career, and that was the sum total of his football experience.

So yes, even a seasoned guy like Amin was a little petrified Saturday afternoon — filling in for well-known broadcaster Pam Ward at the Miami game. It certainly was the biggest audience Amin — who’s primary assignment with ESPNU is late Saturday games featuring historically black colleges — ever had reached.

“I was actually really nervous, because that was the biggest game I’ve done so far,” he said. “(Ward) has a better timeslot than I do. I had a different producer, a different analyst, I was really out of my comfort zone. But once it gets going, it’s the same thing I’ve done for six years now. Just go call the game.”

And you couldn’t sense the nerves through the TV. Amin’s silky baritone was smooth as ever, and he clearly had done his homework.

That’s the biggest difference, of course, from most of Amin’s career — essentially beat work as the voice of the VU basketball team, or the RailCats, or the Patriots. Covering a new team every week — in a sport like football — is a daunting task.

After all, if a key player gets injured and a new face comes into the game, those of us working in print can take a moment to figure out who it is, look him up in the media guide, check his stats online, etc. We have time.

Amin has a few seconds at most to clue his audience in.

“It starts about a week in advance,” Amin said of the prep work. “I did the Miami game on Saturday, and I was already putting boards together for BYU on my flight back that night. Volleyball’s easier. Even if it’s national television, there aren’t as many players, aren’t as many storylines, and it’s easier to follow. It’s more like a basketball game. For football, there’s so much more that goes into it, so many more elements brought into the broadcast, so many more people to cover, so many more possibilities.”

In last week’s BYU game, starting quarterback Jake Heaps was benched midway through the game, and junior Riley Nelson came in to lead the Cougars to a come-from-behind 27-24 win over Utah State. So you can be sure Amin has studied every quarterback on the BYU and San Jose State rosters. Just in case.

The last thing Amin wants is to be caught flat-footed and slack-jawed with nothing to say to an audience of hundreds of thousands. With only 16 play-by-play broadcasters in the weekly ESPN rotation, Amin knows he’s always auditioning to keep his job.

“They can have 16 guys or 30 guys or whatever, the fact of the matter is they can go anywhere in the world and say, ‘Hey, we’re ESPN, want a job?’” Amin said. “So really, they have everybody at their disposal. Is there a little pressure in that sense? Yeah. I want to make sure I don’t screw up on the air. I’m competing to move up, to stay, for better projects — it’s like any other job at any other company.”

Amin is modest about his meteoric rise from VU to ESPN — but only to a point. When the Georgia volleyball coach looks at him and says, ‘You’re too young to be doing this, how is that possible?’, he realizes how fortunate he is.

But he didn’t get here by accident, either.

“Part of it was falling backward into it, part of it was I think I did a good job of networking and proving I was worth something, and part of it was people went to bat for me when I needed them to,” he said. “A lot of people helped me out. I owe more debts than I can pay. I’m just happy someone took a chance on me.”