Sports talk in the barbershop
Published 8:40 pm Saturday, August 15, 2015
Sports talk in Suffolk will be reaching a wider audience next weekend.
Nansemond River High School basketball coach Ed Young and VirginiaPreps.com’s Matthew Hatfield, the hosts of a weekly radio show on ESPN 94.1 FM, were recently invited to broadcast from a local barbershop for a day.
“The idea is normally in a barbershop, you’ll get a lot of conversation about sports,” Young said. “Suffolk, with its history, they get tons of it.”
This makes the location an ideal one for a special installment of Young and Hatfield’s show, “High School Sports Talk.”
“We just want to center it around talking sports at the barbershop, but it’s going to be live on the radio, which has never been done in Suffolk before,” Young said.
The program will air Aug. 22 from 10 a.m. to noon, and Young hopes a lot of people will participate in the show.
“It’s down on East Washington, so it does get a lot of foot traffic, and we’ll have some fun with it,” he said.
Young and Hatfield are trying to get Suffolk’s current high school football coaches to help preview their respective teams and the 2015 season.
“And then throughout the morning when they’re not on, we’re just going to try to interview different customers who come in and have people ask a question or talk sports,” Young said.
As the name indicates, the show normally covers high school sports, but Young said, “For this Saturday, we’re going to open it up for any sports, whether its college, pro or high school.”
He expects to dedicate some time to discussing Suffolk basketball and football players from the past and present, some of whom he coached.
Beamon’s Unisex Salon owner Lester Beamon noted, “Suffolk is a basketball town, a lot of rich basketball history.”
“A lot of former players, they come in the barbershop and we talk about basketball all the time,” he said. “We have three different eras in there sometimes — some guys from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” and now some from the 2000s.
He got the idea of inviting Young and Hatfield to his shop from Tony Lundy, a friend, former classmate and former basketball player at Suffolk High School whom Young coached.
“I thought that would be a good idea,” Beamon said, and he gave Young a call, invited him and asked what needed to be done to make it happen.
“I put him in touch with our sales people at the radio station, and they all worked it out,” Young said.
“I think it’s certainly a unique setting, and I’m extremely excited about it,” Hatfield said. “Any time we can take the show on the road, periodically, it’s something we really look forward to doing and enjoy, because I think it’s mutually beneficial for both us and the fans.”
It gives Hatfield and Young a chance to interact with listeners face-to-face, rather than just over the phone lines, and it gives people less familiar with the show a chance to learn more about it.
Beamon has his customers primed for the special opportunity for sports talk.
“They seem excited, because they can bring the argument to the forefront over the airwaves now, so it won’t just be confined to the barbershop now,” he said.
He also excited for the impact the event will have on his business.
“It puts my barbershop on the map, because I’ve been there for 21 years, and I can’t recall anything happening like this in Suffolk before,” he said.