FRIDAYS 4PM

Salwa Khan:
I'm speaking with Darren Masur and Gary Snoe, and their show is the wildly popular Texan Tailgate on Fridays from 4 to 6 PM. Let's start with you, Gary. Tell us about your background and how you got into radio?

Gary Snoe:
I went to college in San Marcos at Texas State University. I graduated and settled into a job here locally in San Marcos and I've been with that company for 36 years. I'm still working for them. It's a sports medicine company.
I've always been in sports and a big sports advocate. I had twin boys who were in the eighth grade when we moved to Wimberley and they both played in the athletic programs here. How this all this got started was the boys were seniors and Coach Smith who does the Over Easy show had a program every Friday during football season. He was asking senior dads to be interviewed on his show. I was one of the first ones and I think Darren (Masur) went right before me.

Darren Masur:
That’s right, because I had a son on the team too.

Gary Snoe:
Our sons grew up together. Darren and I have been friends for 18 maybe 20 years. We coached baseball together when the boys were 9-years old. We did the coach's show and after I did my 15 minutes with Coach Smith and walked out, Mike Crusham was waiting for me. He was the general manager here at the station at that time.
The radio station had been here a while but it was just starting out, taking baby steps. The broadcasts of the Texan football games were done by a station in Dripping Springs, not by our radio station. We didn't have the equipment and people to do the games.
Mike Crusham along with John Brown, our first producer, their vision was to get everything local, to keep everything local and they really wanted to start with the sports coverage. Mike asked me, would you like to do a sports-based show on Fridays for Wimberley High School, a pregame show. I was in shock because I've never done anything with radio, but I can talk. I am good at talking, so I said sure.
So me and John Brown, we're in this old studio, and I was doing one hour every Friday and it was okay. It wasn't great. But I told John, if we're going to do this, I'm going to have to get some help. Darren was the first logical choice on that. We had known each other forever. We got him involved about halfway through that first year and it just went on from there.

Darren Masur:
I joined the show before we even had broadcasts of the actual game on our air.

Gary Snoe:
That's right. The following year, KWVH got the broadcast rights for the game, so on Fridays during football and volleyball season, in the fall, we bumped our show from one hour to two hours and we still do one hour in the spring.
Volleyball and football kind of rule around here in Wimberley. Those are the two main sports, and they're very good at it, with multiple state championships in both of those. But I brought Darren in, then we brought Kevin in, and the rest is history, and we've been on the air for a long time.

Salwa Khan:
Who is Kevin?

Gary Snoe:
Cougar Kevin Adams is our producer. He's the one that pushes the buttons and also has some input on the sports. He graduated college from the University of Houston. That's how he picked up the Cougar moniker. Kevin does a great job.

Darren Masur
Yeah. I think we started our eighth year. We've had seven full years for Gary, and six and a half for me. I have a similar background. Gary sells products to high school athletic departments and my day job is selling graduation products and letter jackets and stuff like that. We service a lot of the same schools in the area.
It was kind of a natural friendship that we formed and then started coaching together. A big shout out to Coach Smith because who would have thought, when he had us on his show as guests, that eight years later, we'd still be doing a show. He was instrumental in that.
Gary and I knew nothing about the radio business. We didn't even know the call letters of the station. John Brown had to put it up on the window, and we looked at that when we'd go to break. He would say don't forget to say the call letters.
Gary and I sat on a bucket next to each other coaching baseball and Cougar Kev coached with us as well. So when we sit in the studio, it's just like we're sitting in the dugout. A lot of sports shows talk about stats and break down offenses and defenses. We're more entertainment. We leave the stat stuff up to Jarred Robinson, our play-by-play guy, but we try to make it fun and entertaining.

Salwa Khan:
Do you cover other sports or just football and volleyball?

Gary Snoe:
We cover every sport that Wimberley High School plays, but in the fall, the main emphasis is on those two sports because that is their season. In the springtime, we cover baseball, tennis, golf, softball. We’ve got girls and boys basketball, cross country, and soccer that start out at the end of the fall and goes over into the spring.

Darren Masur:
We’ll have students for academics, FFA for the ag kids We've had band members come and promote band stuff, so it's really all extracurriculars. It was set up originally as a pregame football show, but it has morphed.

Gary Snoe:
Last week, we had a senior girl come in and promote the spirit section at the football game. She was trying to raise money to coordinate that a little bit better. She's got a couple of sponsors now and they're helping out, buying things for them to make them louder and rowdier during a game. When the band went to Hawaii to the play in the parade last year, they came on and raised money to pay for their trip to Hawaii.
We do a little bit of everything. We try to get the coaches for the teams that we're playing from other towns. Darren and I have enough connections to where we pretty much know all the coaches out there. That adds a little extra dynamic to the show to have a different point of view than just Wimberley.

Salwa Khan:
How do you keep up with all these different teams and the players and the coaches? Is there a lot of studying?

Gary Snoe:
Word of mouth is mainly how we keep up with it. We still know a lot of the parents that that have kids playing.

Darren Masur: I've got a daughter that's a senior on the volleyball team, and I've got nephews that are younger that are coming up and just getting started with junior high age sports. Yes, there is a lot of studying. I do show prep on Wednesday or Thursday night and watch film on the opponents that the football team's going to play.
I look at previous games for volleyball. I go to a lot of volleyball and basketball games and track meets and try to study and we talk to coaches a lot.

Gary Snoe:
We have very good relationships with the coaches here. They are not just coaches, they're our friends. We talk to them on a weekly basis and get what we need. There’s a lot of stuff out there now on sites like MaxPreps, if you really want to get down into the statistics, I would say it's mainly word of mouth. That's how we get our content. We don't need more than a little bit to get us going. We've been doing it long enough now to where we don't need that much.

Darren Masur: 
Especially for those one hour shows in the spring, because one hour goes like that. By the time you do the underwriting breaks and play a little music in between breaks, it's about forty-seven minutes of talk time. Trust me, Gary and I can fill that up really quick, and Cougar Kev can add to it.

Gary Snoe:
We try to keep it lighthearted and entertaining. It's not that hard to fill two hours.

Salwa Khan:
Do you always have a guest that calls in or somebody that comes to the studio?

Darren Masur:
Almost weekly. Jarred Robinson, he's our play-by-play guy that does our game broadcasts, comes on our show.

Gary Snoe:
He's probably one of the best local play-by-play guys in the country. There's nobody better than him. He had no training, but this guy can call any sport, anytime.

Darren Masur: He's great. And we have coaches from Wimberley on our show. Like Gary said, we have the opposing coaches for Friday night football games on our show. We have students that come in; when we won the state team tennis championship a few years ago, we interviewed the captains and seniors on that team.
We bring in guests, whether it's via phone or they're sitting in studio with us. We were hosting a Wimberley softball tournament here in town and one of the teams we were about to play was walking through town, getting a bite to eat. We were like, Hey, y'all, sit in with us. We're doing a sports show right now. We've been known to call people off the streets to sit in with us.

Salwa Khan:
You have guests call in by phone as well?

Gary Snoe:
Yes, and another avenue we've had to get information is what we call interns. The last two years, we've had students, senior boys, Brax Beck and Jaxson Donaldson. Jaxson was a golfer. Brax had an injury that kept him from playing football. Those two guys provided so much because they give us the student perspective. They are boots on the ground, talking to the players and coaches throughout the day, all week long. They were able to provide the player perspective, because that's their peers. They see them every day.
Gary Snoe 
We've added a new person, a man named Tyler Owen. He's helping us out with the computer side of things. He's really good at putting together videos and graphics.

Darren Masur:
We've upped our social media presence a lot. In the past our social media presence has been me posting something at three PM on a Friday on Facebook or Instagram about listening to our show. He posts usually at the beginning of the week, midweek and on Friday. It's amazing.
Gary Snoe
He's joined us on air now too. He's added a lot.

Darren Masur:
He's also learning how to operate the board in case Kevin's out on a Friday. He was on the Thursday morning show, the Danger Zone show, part of the Wimberley Wake-Up Club program. He's learning all that and he's way more technically savvy than Gary and I are.

Salwa Khan:
How do you go about producing the show? Does one of you decide who the guests are going to be?

Darren Masur:
We'll call each other during the week. Gary will call me and say, Hey, I got Coach so-and-so from whatever high school, that's going to come on with us.

Gary Snoe:
We can do the show without a guest, but it does add a different aspect to it. And, and we always try to keep it light and funny.

Darren Masur:
I'll get with Jarred Robinson who does the play-by-play stuff because he'll have a full roster of both teams and statistics from previous games. I look a lot of that stuff up myself and so I'll get with him and get that part of the production ready. Gary works on guests and really. Is the best at getting us in and out of breaks and providing some levity and some entertainment value.
I'm more the research guy and Cougar Kev is the production guy. He and I will work together on what music we going to play. Let's play the fight song when we come out of a break. Let's take it to the break with a country song or we'll do 80s rock, different things like that.

Salwa Khan:
Do you ever hear from parents who want their child featured on your show?

Darren Masur:
Nobody's really asked for that. We do try to name as many kids as we can during the show. People want to hear their kid's name called. Kids want to hear their name called. We do a pretty good job of mentioning as many kids as we can in one show. We've only had a couple of complaints over the years about something we said, or somebody we compared to someone.

Gary Snoe:
We're here for the kids. That's the only reason we're doing this. We do this for the Wimberley kids. We're never going to put any kids down on this show. It is never going to happen, unless it's our own kids. We're here to promote Wimberley High School and the kids That's what we're here for.

Darren Masur:
The Athletic Booster Club will say, could you promote our big fundraising event? We have parents reach out to us in that capacity; don't forget tonight's a big volleyball or a big soccer game. We already have it on our radar, but it does help to get reminders from parents on that sort of thing.

Salwa Khan:
What are the challenges in doing the show?

Darren Masur:
When we started, it used to be getting here by four o'clock, and parking.

Gary Snoe: Yeah parking. Both of us have real live jobs. Our jobs get very time consuming, especially this time of the year with football season just starting, because I sell athletic medical supplies to schools to play football with and it's just it's very time consuming. Darren's in the graduation business and the ring business and the t shirt business. So during the school year we're really busy.

Darren Masur:
I've scheduled myself a lot lighter on Fridays to accommodate getting here early, getting set up and being prepared.

Salwa Khan:
Are you able to do the show remotely?

Darren Masur:
Yes, thanks to Tim Kiesling, our general manager and Brach Thomas. They are kind of the lifeline of this whole station.

Gary Snoe:
I will be doing that this Friday, because one of my sons that graduated from here is now a football coach in high school, and I will be going to watch his game Friday night. So I'll be doing the show as I am driving down the road.

Salwa Khan:
What are the rewards of doing the show?

Darren Masur:
I always look forward to it because it's a break from our normal routine of our day jobs. When Gary first asked me about it, I went home and asked my wife. I thought I don't know if that's something I want to dedicate and commit to. I thought it would be an additional stress, but to me it's been the exact opposite. It's been a stress reliever and something I look forward to.
I'll give an example of the rewards. After we won the state track championship and we interviewed Coach DeMarco, and he breaks out in emotion and tears over the pride that he had in those kids. Getting to witness that and be the channel for that to get to our listeners. I get goosebumps thinking about it because moments like that and getting to cover all these games, that's the reward to me.

Gary Snoe:
I think the reward to me is hearing the people in town talk about the show. That means they're getting something out of it. We have a guy named Gary Callen, who's one of our best listeners and we’ve developed a real good friendship. He's in his eighties and he's one of the nicest men. He even came into our studio and sat in the corner while we're doing our show. Hearing people like him talk about how much they get out of what we do. I think that's the reward for me.

Darren Masur: We've been on air for the last seven years, and the Wimberley Athletic Department has won a state track championship, two state tennis titles. Jaxson Donaldson, our intern last year won three state golf championships. We've been to two football state championships, one volleyball state runner up appearance, swimmers and divers that have been to state, the track girls won state gold medals. To be able to be a small part of that, not that we're taking any credit for that success, but to have all that happen in a seven-year period while we're doing this show; that's been a big reward.
What we've gotten out of it is the appreciation we have from some of our loyal listeners. That's been cool.

Gary Snoe:
There's people out there that have not missed our show one day. We've had a kid from Wimberley that was in the Navy stationed in Guam who was listening to our show there.

Salwa Khan: 
Is there anything else we should say about Texan Tailgate?

Darren Masur:
I'll say thanks to our underwriters. The sports programming underwriters have really stepped-up big time over the course of the last couple of years

Gary Snoe:
We’ve had some of the same underwriters for all these years.That sponsorship money that comes in helps the station tremendously.

Darren Masur:
It is really the lifeblood of what we do here (at KWVH). We're always looking for more. Our goal was to get 30 underwriters. And we'll get there.

Gary Snoe:
It helps all the shows out. This is a nonprofit community radio station with volunteer workers. Every penny that we get from our underwriters counts. I think the people that underwrite us are really pleased with the product that we put out. They get good exposure by being the underwriter for our shows. It helps the town, and it helps the radio station tremendously.

Salwa Khan:
Thank you, Darren and Gary!