Imagine Corey Graves being your teacher. That could be a reality.
Corey Graves Teaching Live Sports Production
Corey Graves is currently a commentator in WWE, and has been for over a decade. In his time, Corey has worked mostly every brand WWE has to offer including RAW, SmackDown, WWE NXT, Main Event and even Speed. So, it’s natural that with his experiences in live sports, he can teach others and that’s exactly what he’s doing.
TRIB LIVE dropped an interview with Corey where it was revealed that he teaches in the Point Park University communications department in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is his home state. Corey revealed that he was originally invited to speak at the university, but it’s now turned into a new gig.
“I was invited over the last year or two to speak at Point Park College to their broadcasting students, It was wrestling centric, but there were also quite a few students who were broadcasting specific, not necessarily wrestling fans. It went well; they asked me to come back again, and I did. The second time went better than the first.”
Corey went on to have email exchanges with university officials who asked him if he’d be interested in teaching a course. “Which I thought was the most absurd thing I’d ever heard of,” he said.
the chair of the school of communications department. Dr. Bernie Ankney was highly impressed by Graves, real name Matt Polinsky, saying “I was really impressed with the way he interacted and mentored 18-, 19-, 20-year-old students and just watching the energy he brought to his presentation, I thought it would be worth looking into Corey teaching a class. Somebody like that, if you put him in the classroom, students are familiar with his work.”
Graves now teaches Live Sports Production — a three-hour course on Wednesdays. Thankfully for him, the new WWE TKO regime is all for this, moreso than the old guard.
“TKO has seemingly been a lot more open to collaboration and allowing talent to step outside WWE, more so than the old WWE regime, anybody who works for WWE has had an opportunity of some sort that they’ve had to turn down because they couldn’t get permission, or it was a conflict of interest. This really isn’t a wrestling class; it was a broadcasting class. I took it to my manager, and they’ve been supportive to help me with making this happen.”
Luckily, this class is for everyone. Graves is a WWE commentator, but this class has a broader teaching than just wrestling and will help students who want to work in any sport of live sport broadcast.
“Vin Scully wasn’t a baseball commentator. He was a storyteller,” Polinsky said. “You didn’t have to open your eyes. You could envision the park and see the sunset and where the players were at. That’s an art and that’s the art of broadcasting. I think having a wealth of experience doing that, it’s quite literally what I do. Make you like somebody; make you hate somebody. It’s not exclusive to wrestling, but broadcasting can be anything, online, radio, TV. The business has changed so much.”
This is such a cool and unique thing to do for a current WWE employee and will only help the next generation of great sports broadcasters.
H/T TRIB LIVE
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