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Pete Sheppard to Ft Myers sports talker

OK the place is dead from May to the end of October, they are 100 miles away from any major sports teams, the closest thing they have to sports is the Twins and Sox for spring training.

Hockey is The Everblades ( farm team hockey), some triple D Sox and Twins sub farm league teams.... college sports are a bore.

Beasley pays frugally, the cost of living for anyplace decent down there is brutal ( I have owned property there for 25 years) and from May to October you hibernate.

Good luck to him and the Red Sox.

Pete if you want to rent a house short term, look me up.... stay out of Cape Coral, Lehigh Acres, and quite a few parts of Fort Myers and North Fort Myers.....
 
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Enjoy Pete..

This move is odd because Pete has no clue about the college game and I believe people down there live for it.
 
Enjoy Pete..

This move is odd because Pete has no clue about the college game and I believe people down there live for it.

Jacksonville is 4+ hours away , Miami is 140 miles away, Tampa is 125 miles away, Orlando is a 2.5 hour drive away. They might as well be on another planet as nobody I know locally follows teams from those areas.... there is really no connection to them.

Now if you mention Boston sports, or places from the mid west ( anywhere along the snowbird highway known as I-75) you can get a discussion going. I'll be sitting at the bar in the clubhouse and there will be more talk about out of town sports teams than anything in Florida or locally.


If you want to talk about the results at the Redneck Yacht Club ( now known as the Redneck Mud Park) swamp buggy racing is all the rage

Greyhounds still run at the Naples/Fort Myers Greyhound park.

Their college sports consist of Florida Gulf Coast University..... unless you live there I wouldn't expect you to know where it is either....

Mike Greenwell has a Bat A Ball and Family Fun Park there ( I drive by it all the time), maybe there is a story there.

Golf? Fishing? What former HS star was arrested in Dunbar over the weekend?

Market #60? The station pulls a 1.8 in the 12+ ( non PPM market IIRC) I don't claim to be anything but someone that knows very little about the workings of radio, but being the PM drive sidekick in market #60 with less than stellar ratings ( I know the 12+ numbers are not worth a damn) does not seem like a upward career move to me.

(but on the plus side, spring break at the Lani Kai bar ... looney kai to those of us who lived on Fort Myers Beach is proof there is a God)
 
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Jacksonville is 4+ hours away , Miami is 140 miles away, Tampa is 125 miles away, Orlando is a 2.5 hour drive away. They might as well be on another planet as nobody I know locally follows teams from those areas.... there is really no connection to them.

Ahhh, the old "nobody I know likes X, therefore X isn't popular" logical fallacy! If Florida is like the other Southern states that have big state universities with big football programs, then there are Florida and Florida State fans up, down and across the state. Maybe the snowbirds and the retirees who've permanently moved to Fort Myers don't care about college sports (That's what the OP was posting about; you've confused the issue by bringing pro sports cities into the conversation -- UF is in Gainesville, FSU in Tallahassee.), but they're not the audience the station wants because there's no advertising money there. Unless the natives are unlike any other in the America that is passionate about college football -- that is, just about everywhere but New England and NY/NJ -- the natives and the younger demos there will want to talk about the Gators, the Noles, even the Miami Hurricanes, and Pete will have to take a crash course in SEC and ACC football and feign enthusiasm as best he can.
 
(but on the plus side, spring break at the Lani Kai bar ... looney kai to those of us who lived on Fort Myers Beach is proof there is a God)

Hey, I stayed there a couple of years ago, oddly enough during a spring break week. Place is kind of a dump still living in the 1980s or earlier.
 
Red Sox spring training home
275px-Jet_Blue_Park_at_Fenway_South.JPG
 
Hey, I stayed there a couple of years ago, oddly enough during a spring break week. Place is kind of a dump still living in the 1980s or earlier.

The place has other "attributes" if you get my drift..... great scenery.

As to Bob and his pic of Jet Blue Park/ Fenway South I have been there a bunch of times.... if you are there during spring training the 5 dollar tour is worth every cent. It is a GREAT facility and an almost carbon copy of Fenway Park right down to a "Green Monster" scoreboard that was at one time used at Fenway.

In the bad old days when the spring training facility was at City of Palms Stadium ( think of a ballpark in the middle of the worst section of Boston) it wasn't a place you wanted to catch a night game.... or a day game.... smack in the middle of a war zone.

I had a friend that had a job offer in Fort Myers , he ended up in Alaska and he was a lot safer and better off taking the gig in the middle of nowhere.
 
Yup, was at a game at Fenway South back in March. It was the Sox vs Team USA from the World Baseball Classic. Team USA used a lot of Red Sox minor leaguers, mainly pitchers, as they had just a few of their own and they didn't want to use them before starting actual Classic play. Game was ok, lots of people coming and going. I left after the 6th inning.
 
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