Glassboro, New Jersey — At a basketball game for the Delaware Blue Coats of the NBA G League, sitting alongside the radio play-by-play announcer is color commentator Allan Wylie, who calls them as he sees them — even though he never sees them.
“Just because somebody may be blind, or deaf, or whatever disability you want to say, doesn’t mean they’re not capable of something,” Wylie told CBS News.
Wylie, who is blind, is a freshman sports communication major at Rowan University in New Jersey. His professor, Neil Hartman, says Wylie is already one of the top students in the program.
Hartman says many listeners to Blue Coats games do not even know he is blind.
“We got emails saying, ‘I do not believe that,'” said Hartman, who is the senior director for the Center of Sports Communication and Social Impact at Rowan. “…They said, ‘This can’t be true. How can this guy do this?'”
It’s a good question. How does Wylie do it?
“I mean, it’s a lot of listening,” Wylie explained. “I listen to the crowd reaction. I listen to the players. I can listen to the coaches. You know, I can hear the ball bouncing from right to left. I can hear it go off the rim. Every sound to me is important.”
It also helps that that he has been honing these skills for essentially his entire life, listening to games and announcing along. As he got older, he read and researched and memorized, amassing an encyclopedic knowledge of sports.
Today, his color commentating skills are so second nature he can even analyze games playing silently on a screen, like he had to do when he auditioned for the Blue Coats internship. That audition got him the gig.
Said Hartman: “This is a young man who has a future in the business.”
