A door opened for Paul Keels as a student at Xavier University in the late 70s.
He was wise enough and eager enough to walk through it, and that first step set the stage for a broadcasting career that's spanned more than four decades.
"When I was there at WVXU, we did high school football on Friday nights, did GCL games," said Keels, a 1975 Moeller High School grad. "And then at that time, there was no commercial station to carry Xavier games. So the student station did it. And they hired a professional play-by-play announcer, a guy that was actually a former player at Xavier, Dave Piontek, and then a handful of us students kind of rotated and did games with him."
Even when Keels wasn't on the broadcast, he'd bring a tape recorder and practice calling the games by himself.
"At Schmidt Fieldhouse, there was kind of an upper perch where hardly anybody sat. I think it was an older press area," said Keels. "And I would go up there with a tape recorder and just practice doing some of the games and listen back to it just as a way to try to get some experience."
