By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Ellinwood's Alex Hammeke has long had an interest in sports. After one year of Junior Eagle football, however, he realized playing them was not in the cards. He began filming a local team as a sixth grader and his media career was born. Hammeke and his colleagues at KLPR 91.1 FM at the University of Nebraska at Kearney were recently nominated for seven national excellence in broadcasting awards. Hammeke was nominated for two awards, including sports update and best news promotion.
"It took me a little by surprise a little bit getting nominated, but this is also the expectation we've been working for as a station is to get nominated for stuff like this," Hammeke said. "It means a lot that my work and my colleagues' work is respected. It's a great honor, but it's also kind of business as normal for us at this point with the amount of stuff we've been nominated for in the past few years."
Hammeke's love of sports continued to evolve throughout middle school. In high school, his English teacher put him in touch with her husband, Scott Mitchum, to help with broadcasts at Central Plains High School in Claflin. His love of broadcasting sports continued to grow.
Hammeke began work as the public address announcer at Barton Community College basketball and volleyball games while a senior at Ellinwood High School. He continued that work upon graduating from EHS in 2019, and also did contract work for Eagle Radio in Great Bend and Post Rock Radio in Hays. In Kearney, he was picked by NRG Media. He transitioned from sports commentary to on-air work. At the time, KLPR had no news programming.
"If you want to have people listening to a station, it doesn't matter whether it's top-40, country, rock, oldies," he said. "If you want people to listen to your station, they also want to get the weather, news, sports, and all that. We had a really good sports department here at KLPR, but it never had a news department really ever."
In August 2022, Hammeke started "KLPR Daybreak," a 15-minute news segment each morning. Those segments remain but the show has added an hour-long public affairs program over the lunch hour on Thursdays, and a news editorial every Friday morning.
"It goes at 7:45, but every morning and even the night before, I'm researching what I want to read on air the next morning. There's about an hour and a half that goes into one 15-minute news show. On the sports side of things, you're calling the coaches for a pregame interview. You're checking stats for both your team and the opposition. That's a few hours in and of itself. There's quite a bit of prep that goes into everything."
As a campus radio station, KLPR's reach extends just a few miles outside of Kearney. But Hammeke said the news never stops there.
"There's stuff in town that, if I didn't cover it, I think I'd lose my audience," he said. "Sure, you're a campus radio station but you can't ignore what happens in town, or what the governor has to say, or the big news that's happening internationally. There's a lot of everything in my news coverage."
The station's reach may not be huge in terms of numbers, but Hammeke takes pride in knowing several listeners have only recently tuned in, in part, because of his programming. Unlike many stations that can prerecord segments, KLPR is the old-school live variety.
"It was a bit intimidating at first but it wasn't overly terrible," Hammeke said. "The first week was rough, but that's also just getting used to being on the radio live for the first time in almost forever."
Hammeke is set to graduate from UNK in the spring of 2024 with a degree in sports communication. He already has job offers in Nebraska and Kansas but is unsure where radio will take him next.
"The next few months look kind of tough in terms of should I stay or should I go, and depending on which direction I move," he said. "I'll be on the airwaves somewhere, but where is the big question."