Orlando City Team Doesn't Provide Radio Play-By-Play

With the 2015 Major League Soccer regular season opening last weekend, I was grateful to be able to watch Orlando's expansion team play its first game ever on TV...ESPN-2 showed it.  Besides that network, FoxSports and the Spanish-language Univision Deportes are showing live games of the MLS this year.  That's wonderful...but where is the radio play-by-play coverage?  I searched high and low on the Internet, and for the Orlando City MLS team, I found only "Real Radio"/104.1 in Orlando claiming to be the Orlando team's station...and they're only featuring a commentary show, not live play-by-play.  Now you might be asking why would I want radio when I have TV?  For one, even with the three channels broadcasting MLS games weekly, my team isn't always going to be featured.  For another, I may be in the car or elsewhere without access to a television...and I'm not one of those folks with their eyeballs constantly glued to their cellphones with all the sports apps.  And yet further...although it may seem counter-intuitive, you can sometimes pick up more from the radio than you can from TV...

When I was a kid, in the fall of 1968, I discovered that the relatively new American Basketball Association was starting a franchise in Miami (dubiously nicknamed the Floridians).  Since I was in the habit at the time of fiddling around on the radio to find interesting stations to listen to, one evening I came across a weak 250-watt AM station, WOCN, transmitting out of Miami on 1450 kHz.   Normally a station that played only elevator music, WOCN surprisingly was broadcasting a Floridians game play-by-play.  I remember the team they were playing that first time I heard them: the Minnesota Pipers.  From then on, I would listen to the broadcasts and soon got to know all of the players on the team, even the subs.  Why?  Because the announcers, given the fact that listeners couldn't see the game, had to describe everything in detail.  So although I didn't get a complete picture of what was going on, in some ways I ended up with much more information!  I don't think I ever did watch a Miami Floridians game on TV (the lack of the ABA on television probably did more to sink it than anything else), but I did follow them on the radio.  Nowadays, it seems things have reversed themselves, with TV access easy and radio often difficult to find.  I think that's a shame and counterproductive for the franchise as well:  radio is a relatively cheap way to promote your team and build up a fan base.

Maybe Orlando will come up with a radio play-by-play option eventually.  But I think they have already made a big mistake by not have one from the beginning.  Of course, with satellite radio being what it is now, for all I know they may do play-by-play there.  But that would miss the entire point of exposing the product to the general public to generate interest...