If you are a fan of Madison-area sports, the name Adam Eichstedt will seem familiar to you. You could have heard him on radio either on the Big Ten 70 (1070 AM) or WIBA (1310 AM).

If you have been to any home games for Badger men’s hockey in the last four years, or have been to any of the Badgers women’s basketball home games this season, he was the in arena host for those, too.

If Eichstedt is not working with the Wisconsin Badgers, he is working with the Edgewood College Eagles or the Madison College WolfPack. He is either doing play-by-play or running the scoreboard, and other behind-the-scenes things like helping run equipment for live streaming.

“I was always a talkative kid. So, I knew maybe something in communications would be good for me,” said Eichstedt, the Athletic Communication Assistant for Madison College, where he began working in 2015.

He got the idea of working in media from watching news coverage of the Green Bay Packers’ trip to the 1996 Super Bowl. He saw that people were getting paid to go work at the Super Bowl, and realized that would be the kind of thing he’d like to do.

Eichstedt was not looking for a job in front of the camera, he wanted to do something behind the scenes. He was big on radio.

“There seemed to be more opportunities here in this type of market with radio than TV. So, that’s where I started from, and kind from spiraled from there,” Eichstedt said.

Eichstedt aspires to have fun announcing, doing play-by-play, or call games on the radio like Bob Uecker (baseball announcer), Matt Lepay (Badgers football and men’s basketball announcer) and others.

“With Matt Lepay, you almost forget you are not watching it on TV. He paints such a good picture throughout the game, and you feel like you are there already. I kind of want to see if I can do that,” Eichstedt adds.

College athletics has a special appeal to Eichstedt.

“There is something about the college games and the atmosphere around it,” he said. “There seems to be at times more passion involved. In college, you are taking the camaraderie from the high school level and amplifying it sometimes by one thousand or more. Which is just unique, and having to been a student at UW (Madison) and having to go to football and basketball games, and being at the biggest games in the history of those programs. You get caught up in all of it, and just find more ways to get involved in it.”

Madison has its own uniqueness, and that is a big draw to him. Eichstedt left a job a radio job in Iowa to come back and work in the city.

“Obviously, it is a great college town. I always tell people, when they ask me about what makes Madison great. It can be whatever you want it to be. From the sports stand point the people here are great, no matter what level your talking about… people just love sports around here,” he said.

His favorite part of the job is getting to know the student athletes and sharing their stories with others.

“Whether be it would be here at Madison College with our student athletes, off covering a high school event, or anything with the Badgers or whatever it might be, getting to know the players and what their story is, and being able to share that in a way that the people who are interested in their careers can feel involved,” said Eichstedt.