In Dayton, March Madness thrills heard in Mandarin

As March Madness sweeps the states, a college basketball team from Ohio captured the national spotlight not because of anything the team did, but a novel venture the team launched - doing an audio broadcast in Mandarin.

On Friday, CBS This Morning aired a feature about the University of Dayton (UD) men's basketball team audio broadcasts in Mandarin by introducing two of the broadcasting team: Zhou Yiqing and Shi Xueyin.

The university launched the service in 2015 by selecting Chinese students to do an audio broadcast in Mandarin for its men's basketball team. The broadcast is presented online via DaytonFlyers.com.

Six students stood out in the selection at the end of 2015. After one graduated, one quit and one recently joined, the team is now made up of Zhou Yiqing, Shi Xueyin, Zhou Bin, Wang Wei and Liu Ruixu, who do broadcasts in pairs in rotation. The five announcers are all full-time students, whose majors range from electro-optics engineering to financial mathematics.

For Zhou and Shi, who happen to be boyfriend and girlfriend, this is the second consecutive season they are broadcasting.

The two electrical engineering graduate students applied to the positions because of a great love of basketball and particularly Flyers basketball.

"We were very nervous at the beginning, since it was our first time to do a broadcast and we were not familiar with our players at that time, not to mention the opposing players," Zhou told China Daily.

But after broadcasting six games last season, Zhou said, nervousness has been replaced by excitement.

The pair is from Shanghai Normal University, which has a working relationship with UD. They chose to take their last year of undergrad study in Dayton and then started grad school here.

UD has partnerships with 10 Chinese universities and also runs the University of Dayton China Institute in the Suzhou Industrial Park in Jiangsu province in Southeast China.

Enrollment of Chinese students in the US has been increasing dramatically - prior to 2005, UD enrolled fewer than 300 international students; now there are nearly 700 Chinese students studying at UD, the most of any international student population on campus.

University officials got inspired when they saw the University of Illinois broadcasting football games in Mandarin.

"So they (the board of directors) asked if it would be possible to do the same to be able to connect with those students, who are over in the China Institute as well as those who are here on our campus," said Michael LaPlaca, UD's assistant director of athletics.

"I'm a big fan of basketball and I used to work at UD athletics, which left me with deep feelings for this basketball team and this school," said Lin Yuanzhou, a UD alumnus who had studied there for five years and is now working and living in Beijing.

"We can barely get exposed to UD-related content here in China, this broadcasting in Mandarin could be one of the few channels," said Lin.

"It's a pretty good way for me to recall my days at UD just by listening to the live voice on the way to work," Lin added.

Dayton men's basketball team will play Wichita State in Indianapolis on Friday. Fans will be able to listen to a Mandarin broadcast of the game by Zhou and Shi.

xiaohong@chinadailyusa.com