Forget about Carolina blue and that darker shade sported by the Blue Devils.
This is one award that’ll be painted purple.
The first thing greeting guests at the Holiday Inn this weekend is a huge banner in the lobby that reads, “Welcome Jeff Charles, Voice of the Pirates.”
Charles earned his first N.C. Sportscaster of the Year award from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association for his coverage of East Carolina University athletics. The victory in this contest over his peers from the Atlantic Coast Conference thrilled Pirate fans across the state, who fight a constant battle of respect for their school against the likes of UNC, Duke, N.C. State and Wake Forest.
“I think it’s really neat because nobody from eastern Carolina has ever won this award,”Charles said. “When they called me, I wanted to make a point to tell our fans, to let them share in the joy of winning this award.
“People out there are so passionate about this team,”Charles added. “You know how Pirate fans are — any time they can upstage the ACC, they get a big kick out of it.”
When Charles joined the Pirate Sports Radio Network in 1988, he covered a dreadful football and men’s basketball team. To see East Carolina play, you had to be in Greenville, because the Pirate games weren’t televised.
Now, Charles spends about half his time on TV issues. In addition to his play-by-play duties, he’s the director of electronic media at the school, coordinating coverage with ESPN and Fox Sports Net.
“As much as anything, it’s a statement about how far East Carolina has progressed,” Charles said of his award. “Ten, 15, 20 years ago, we were kind of an afterthought. We’ve come a long way at ECU.”
A pair of journeys started in earnest in 1991. The football team went 11-1 and beat N.C. State in the Peach Bowl.
More bowl games followed and the Pirates’ rabid football fan base continued to grow. ECU added an upper deck to Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium, built a new sports medicine building and will open a strength and conditioning center this fall in the previously open end zone. The three-story structure boasts a 25,000 square-foot weight room.
“The perception of the program has changed so much in the minds of people,”Charles said. “We were everybody’s whipping boy on the football schedule for a long time.”
The Pirates’ breakout year in 1991 also afforded Charles a chance to dust off an old line he’d used earlier in his broadcasting career. While covering Furman University in South Carolina in 1982, Charles capped a victory on the football field with, “You can paint this one purple,”for the purple-clad Paladins.
He had to shelve it during a stint at maroon-and-orange Virginia Tech, but he dusted off the phrase for the Pirates.
“You don’t say it once and have people pick it up,”Charles said. “I think it caught on in 1991 — I said it 11 times.”
He got the idea from legendary Cincinnati Reds announcer Marty Brennaman — who got his start in Salisbury at WSTP-1490. Charles always listened to Reds games while growing up outside of Dayton, Ohio, and loved Brennaman’s tag line of, “This one belongs to the Reds.”
“Listening to him say that, I thought it was neat for a play-by-play announcer to have a signature saying,”Charles said.
His ECU slogan found its way onto T-shirts, with proceeds benefitting the ECU scholarship fund.
The school hasn’t had a bit of trouble selling those 10,000 items each of the past three years. Charles’ hope is that the basketball and baseball teams can catch up to where football is now.
The hoops team joins Conference-USA this season, and plans are underway for a new 3,500-seat baseball stadium. Both are steps in the university’s continuing efforts to carve out a bigger and better niche for East Carolina’s purple Pirates in a Carolina blue state.
As it happens, Charles will be there, painting a picture of the action over the air.
“The program is growing, and it’s great to be a part of that,”said Charles, who has no plans to move on. “I’m a ground-floor guy. That’s a little bit unique.”
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