Dave Armstrong (born May 10, 1957 in

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

) is an American television

sports announcer In sports broadcasting, a sports commentator (also known as sports announcer or sportscaster) provides a real-time commentary of a game or event, usually during a live broadcast, traditionally delivered in the historical present tense. Radio was ...

for professional and college sports. He spent nine years as the play-by-play announcer for two

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

teams (

Kansas City Royals The Kansas City Royals are an American professional baseball team based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) Central division. The team was founded as an expans ...

and

Colorado Rockies The Colorado Rockies are an American professional baseball team based in Denver. The Rockies compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West division. The team plays its home baseball games at Coors Fie ...

), in the NFL he has worked with both the

Seattle Seahawks The Seattle Seahawks are a professional American football team based in Seattle. The Seahawks compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) West, which they rejoined in 2002 as ...

and the

Kansas City Chiefs The Kansas City Chiefs are a professional American football team based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Chiefs compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's American Football Conference (AFC) West division. The tea ...

broadcasting regular and pre-season games and also announced several games for the NBA’s

Denver Nuggets The Denver Nuggets are an American professional basketball team based in Denver. The Nuggets compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Western Conference Northwest Division. The team was founded as the D ...

. He broadcasts

Big 12 The Big 12 Conference is a college athletic conference headquartered in Irving, Texas, USA. It consists of ten full-member universities. It is a member of Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for all sports. Its fo ...

college basketball games for

ESPN Regional Television ESPN Events is an American multinational sporting event promoter owned by ESPN Inc. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and shares its operations with SEC Network and formerly with ESPNU. The corporation organizes sporting events f ...

and

Big 12 Now Big or BIG may refer to: * Big, of great size or degree Film and television * ''Big'' (film), a 1988 fantasy-comedy film starring Tom Hanks * '' Big!'', a Discovery Channel television show * ''Richard Hammond's Big'', a television show present ...

and has been calling games in this conference since 1988. His signature “Wow!” is known as the exclamation mark on exceptional plays.

Career

Armstrong graduated with a B.A. in Broadcasting from John Brown University and began his career working in

radio Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...

and

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

in the

Midwest The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four Census Bureau Region, census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of ...

. He served as the Program Director for

KKOY (AM) KKOY (1460 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a country music format. Licensed to Chanute, Kansas Chanute () is a city in Neosho County, Kansas, United States. Founded on January 1, 1873, it was named after railroad engineer and aviation pi ...

/ FM in Chanute, KS before moving to KAYS-TV in Hays, KS then on to

KSNW KSNW (channel 3) is a television station in Wichita, Kansas, United States, affiliated with NBC and Telemundo. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group, and maintains studios on North Main Street in northwest Wichita (near downtown); its tran ...

-TV in Wichita as the Sports Director. During his time with KSNW-TV, he began doing play-by-play for professional

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

and many collegiate sports. In 1988, Armstrong’s sports broadcasting career took off when he joined

Raycom Sports Raycom Sports is an American producer of sports television programs. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and owned and operated by Gray Television. It was founded in 1979 by husband and wife, Rick and Dee Ray. In the 1980s, Raycom ...

to do play-by-play for Big 8 (now the

)

college basketball In United States colleges, top-tier basketball is governed by collegiate athletic bodies including National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the United States Collegiate Athleti ...

. He eventually added nearly every college sport to his list of professional credits:

Football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

Baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

Wrestling Wrestling is a series of combat sports involving grappling-type techniques such as clinch fighting, throws and takedowns, joint locks, pins and other grappling holds. Wrestling techniques have been incorporated into martial arts, combat ...

Volleyball Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules. It has been a part of the official program of the Summ ...

Tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...

and

Track and Field Track and field is a sport that includes athletic contests based on running, jumping, and throwing skills. The name is derived from where the sport takes place, a running track and a grass field for the throwing and some of the jumping events ...

. Armstrong also calls the televised games on the

Jayhawk Network Jayhawk may refer to: *Jayhawker, originally a term for United States Civil War guerrilla fighters, later applied generally to residents of Kansas *Jayhawk (mascot), the mascot of many schools and their sports teams, derived from the term Jayhawke ...

for the

Kansas Jayhawks The Kansas Jayhawks, commonly referred to as simply KU or Kansas, are the athletic teams that represent the University of Kansas. KU is one of three schools in the state of Kansas that participate in NCAA Division I. The Jayhawks are also a mem ...

(1993–present). He has done play-by-play for

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

Prime Network Prime Sports (originally known as the Prime Sports Network (PSN), and also known as Prime Network or simply Prime) is the collective name for a former group of regional sports networks in the United States that were owned by Liberty Media, ope ...

Fox Sports Fox Sports is the brand name for a number of sports channels, broadcast divisions, programming, and other media around the world. The ''Fox Sports'' name has since been used for other sports media assets. These assets are held mainly by the Fo ...

and the

American Sports Network American Sports Network (ASN) was a sports brand owned by the U.S. television station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group through its Sinclair Networks subsidiary. Formed in July 2014, the multicast network component of ASN produced broadcasts of sp ...

calling games in the Big 12, the

Big East The Big East Conference is a collegiate athletic conference that competes in NCAA Division I in ten men's sports and twelve women's sports. Headquartered in New York City, the eleven full-member schools are primarily located in Northeast and ...

, the

Big Ten The Big Ten Conference (stylized B1G, formerly the Western Conference and the Big Nine Conference) is the oldest Division I collegiate athletic conference in the United States. Founded as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representati ...

and the

ACC ACC most often refers to: * Atlantic Coast Conference, an NCAA Division I collegiate athletic conference located in the US *American College of Cardiology, A US-based nonprofit medical association that bestows credentials upon cardiovascular spec ...

. His professional sports credentials include three seasons as the television voice of Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals (1993–1995) followed by six seasons with the Colorado Rockies (1996–2001). Rounding out his experience in professional sports, he has done play-by-play in the NFL (Seattle Seahawks in 1992 and the Kansas City Chiefs in 2009) as well as in the NBA, filling in during the 1996 - 2001 seasons with the Denver Nuggets. Armstrong is a member of the

National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association The National Sports Media Association (NSMA), formerly the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, is an organization of sports media members in the United States, and constitutes the American chapter of the International Sports Pr ...

. Armstrong retired from broadcasting on November 28, 2022; the last event he called was an 87-55 victory by

Kansas Kansas () is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka, and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is a landlocked state bordered by Nebraska to the north; Missouri to the east; Oklahoma to the south; and Colorado to the ...

over

Texas Southern Texas Southern University (Texas Southern or TSU) is a public historically black university in Houston, Texas. The university is one of the largest and most comprehensive historically black college or universities in the USA with nearly 10,000 ...

in men's college basketball.

Other Work

In addition to his sports announcing work, Armstrong is also an

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

and

speaker Speaker may refer to: Society and politics * Speaker (politics), the presiding officer in a legislative assembly * Public speaker, one who gives a speech or lecture * A person producing speech: the producer of a given utterance, especially: ** I ...

. His book, ''“Driving From Here to Wow: Looking at Life Through the Windshield”'' (2008), is an inspirational and humorous account of many of his life experiences – both personal and professional. Armstrong also frequently emcees for corporate and charitable events throughout the country, speaks at youth

sports camp A summer camp or sleepaway camp is a supervised program for children conducted during the summer months in some countries. Children and adolescents who attend summer camp are known as ''campers''. Summer school is usually a part of the academic ...

s, does commercial voice work for documentaries and provides the voice for promotional videos developed for

corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and r ...

s and

trade association A trade association, also known as an industry trade group, business association, sector association or industry body, is an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific Industry (economics), industry. An industry tra ...

References

External links

Kansas City Royals All-Time Broadcasters Lowe's Senior Class Award Article
{{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, Dave 1957 births Living people American television sports announcers Big 12 Conference College basketball announcers in the United States College football announcers Colorado Rockies announcers Denver Nuggets announcers John Brown University alumni Kansas City Chiefs announcers Kansas City Royals announcers Kansas Jayhawks basketball Major League Baseball broadcasters National Basketball Association broadcasters National Football League announcers Television personalities from Detroit Seattle Seahawks announcers Women's college basketball announcers in the United States Major Indoor Soccer League (1978–1992) commentators