Steve Buckhantz, Curt Dudley bring 90 years of experience to JMU hoops broadcasts

On a recent weekday at 4:30 p.m. – exactly 150 minutes before the opening tip – veteran sports broadcaster Steve Buckhantz walked into the almost-empty Atlantic Union Bank Center on the campus of JMU in Harrisonburg.

A 1977 JMU graduate and a resident of Northern Virginia, Buckhantz was in town to provide color commentary for ESPN+ for the action between the host Dukes and visiting Marshall in a Sun Belt men’s basketball game.

After sitting down his satchel at a courtside table along press row, Buckhantz unwrapped some electrical cords, set up his laptop and looked at the detailed pages of notes he uses to prepare for games he works.

A few minutes later he headed to the broadcast auxiliary room and exchanged greetings with broadcast partner Curt Dudley, a 1983 graduate of Bridgewater College and a long-time fixture in communications at JMU. Between the two, Buckhantz and Dudley combine for nearly 90 years of experience in sports broadcasting/communications.

“He is great; he is just so easygoing,” Buckhantz, 70, said of Dudley, a long-time Bridgewater resident and graduate of Booker T. Washington High in Norfolk. “I would like to think we work well together.”

There are about 20 people that contribute to the broadcasts, according to Dudley, who handles play-by-play, though he and Buckhantz can switch roles on the fly if need be.

“He has some really good suggestions for our overall production,” Dudley, sitting in a Bridgewater coffee shop one recent morning, said of Buckhantz. “He brings that level of expertise and applies it. A lot of things were subtle suggestions that I picked up on.”

‘Mind-boggling’

Nearly 50 years after first setting foot on campus as a freshman, after one semester at Miami, Buckhantz is blown away with the transformation of the school – especially the football program that is now known nationally after losing at powerhouse Oregon in the national playoffs.

“It is mind-boggling to see where this school has come,” said Buckhantz, standing courtside about two hours before tip. “This year was phenomenal. To look at the TV and see them even discussed with the likes of Georgia, Alabama and Oregon, we can’t believe it. We shake our heads.”

For comparison, in 1976 when Buckhantz was a senior, the Dukes played home football games against Glenville State, Towson State, California State (of Pennsylvania), Frostburg State and Shippensburg State.

The “we” is a group of about eight friends; many whose relationship goes back to when Buckhantz was a student. That group includes Van Snowdon, a senior for the Dukes in basketball in 1976-1977, and H. David O’Donnell, a long-time judge in Harrisonburg and a 1978 JMU graduate.

“We all sat on the hill (at JMU football games). Often, we didn’t know a game was going on. You got to see the game and you had a tremendous party,” said Buckhantz, noting that the school changed its name from Madison College to JMU the year he graduated.

A kicker and punter at Washington-Lee High (now Washington-Liberty) in Arlington, Buckhantz was accepted into JMU, American and Miami coming out of high school. His first semester was at Miami in 1973, but he was among hundreds of students trying to break into working on the radio station. “I was green as grass. I had no chance,” he said.

So, the second semester he began at JMU with the help of his high school football coach, Ellis Wisler, who had since joined the staff of then-head coach Challace McMillin. Wisler, who passed in 2018 in Harrisonburg, played football at George Washington University. The first football coach at JMU, McMillin died in 2020 in Harrisonburg.

Soon after arriving at JMU, Buckhantz went to campus radio station WMRA. “There were eight (students) there, and I was the only one interested in sports. The next semester, I was the sports director. WMRA was 10 watts of power at the that time. We later got a $100,000 grant from the state, and we went to 50,000 watts of FM stereo. That was huge. The radio station (facilities) was fabulous,” said Buckhantz, who then played intramural football instead of for the school team.

Later on, the school was looking for a color commentary for basketball to work with Tom Dulaney Slonaker, the former sports director at what became WHSV TV, who later moved to Charlottesville and made a transition to the insurance field while also calling games for ESPN, MASN and other outlets.

“I took a reel-to-reel at the Capital Centre in Landover (Maryland) and did play-by-play of a Bullets game. Rich Murray was the sports information director at JMU. I played him the tape and got the job. Tom was my mentor and my friend. He was the best; he taught me so much,” Buckhantz said. “A real pro with a great voice.”

“He was new at this, and a quick study, and we soon developed a lifetime friendship,” Slonaker wrote to the AFP about Buckhantz as a college student. “I could tell immediately we would bring a great show to the broadcast because he obviously loved what he was doing. His talent showed up immediately.”

Murray, a former Bridgewater resident, became the long-time sports information director at Virginia before retiring in 2012. The Washington & Lee University grad was also the news director at WAYB-AM in Waynesboro before working 11 years at JMU and 29 at Virginia.

Southern journey

Buckhantz began doing sports and the weather at Channel 3, with studios near Weavers Mennonite Church on Route 33 west. After that he worked in television in Chattanooga, Nashville and Atlanta before moving back to the Washington, D.C., area in 1984.

He worked for several years doing weekday sports for WTTG-TV and was the television voice of the Washington Wizards for 22 years before his contract expired in 2019 – much to the chagrin of many fans of the NBA team.

“I’m personally more proud of ‘Buck’ the person,” Slonaker wrote. “Always considerate, compassionate, and in my life, I have never heard him speak ill of anyone, no matter how much he may be baited to do so.”

When his contract was not renewed by the NBA team, Dudley – with the title now of Director of Broadcast Services Emeritus – heard from folks at JMU. “If you have a spot for Steve, we think it would go well,” was their message, Dudley noted.

While Buckhantz and Dudley teamed up to do some JMU football games earlier this decade, the Arlington product is synonymous with basketball.

His partner for 20 of those years doing Wizards broadcasts was former Washington guard Phil Chenier, 75, who in the 1970s was a special guest of the late JMU basketball coach Lou Campanelli at youth camps at Godwin Hall.

“He talks about it all of the time,” Buckhantz said of Chenier. For two years doing the Wizards his broadcast partner was Kara Lawson, a hoop star from West Springfield High in Northern Virginia who played at Tennessee and is now the head women’s coach at Duke.

Buckhantz had several signature phrases while with the Wizards – but none more than “dagger,” when a player hit a shot in the final minutes or seconds of the game that all but sealed a victory.

As a teen, Buckhantz was a basketball referee and called games in the Urban Coalition League, which attracted NBA players. He grew up as a big fan of NBA stars Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Chenier, who broke into the NBA with the Baltimore Bullets in 1971.

On a hot summer day at Theodore Roosevelt High in inner-city Washington, D.C., Buckhantz was working a game in which Chenier was playing in the 1970s. Until then, they had never met.

“He called me a name which I won’t repeat. I didn’t do anything; he looked at me and said it again, so I had to hit him with a (technical) foul. Who would have thought I would give a T to one of my favorite players. To this day, he is one of my closest friends,” Buckhantz said.

Buckhantz also worked the home game on Jan. 10 with ODU and his third and final game of the season is slated for Feb. 14 when the Dukes host Appalachian State in Sun Belt play.

The JMU graduate recently launched the Steven B. Buckhantz Broadcast Journalism Scholarship Fund in the School of Media Arts and Design. “I am happy about that. I would love to have some sort of legacy here,” he said.

The other broadcast partner with play-by-play man Dudley is Kirby Dean, a former basketball standout at Spotswood High and EMU who was an assistant at VMI and the head coach at Waynesboro High and EMU before taking a job with the Rockingham County Parks and Recreation Department as director in 2018.

“He is very good at it. He breaks down the x’s and o’s. Every time we bring him in there is like a social media cheer” for the local product, Dudley said of Dean. And that “social media cheer” also hits home when Buckhantz comes to JMU for hoops broadcasts.

Notes

• Del Norwood was a coach and gym teacher at Washington-Lee when Buckhantz went to school there. “A legendary baseball coach,” Buckhantz said of the late Norwood, the father of former JMU and NFL kicker Scott Norwood. Del Norwood went into the Virginia Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2024.
• Buckhantz was friends at JMU with Jim Barbe, a baseball standout who was drafted in 1977 by the Texas Rangers. Barbe, who reached the Double-A level with Texas, was teammates at JMU with Salem native Billy Sample, the first Duke to make the Majors. Barbe is a member of the JMU Hall of Fame.
• Former Harrisonburg High football coach Tim Sarver died on Jan. 11. He compiled a record of 216-82 from 1985 to 2010 and won the Valley District title 14 times, with a state title in 2001. Sarver also coached at Bath County, Lord Botetourt, Stonewall Jackson and Osbourn after playing football at Emory & Henry. Among his players at HHS were future NFLers Landon Turner, who played at North Carolina and with the New Orleans Saints in 2016, and Akeem Jordan, a JMU standout who saw time in the NFL with Philadelphia, Kansas City and Washington.
• Temple assistant basketball coach Bill Courtney, a standout at West Springfield and Bucknell, died on Jan. 13 at age 56. He was an assistant at Virginia, Virginia Tech and George Mason, among other schools, and part of the staff at Mason when the Patriots made their Final Four run in 2006.
• The Charlotte Hornets will retire the No. 30 jersey of Dell Curry on March 19. Curry grew up Grottoes and starred at Fort Defiance High and Virginia Tech before playing in the NBA from 1986-2002, with most of those seasons with Charlotte.
• Alex Guerra, the head baseball coach at Radford University, received the Valor Award from the NCAA in mid-January for his efforts of saving a student from drowning in a river near campus in 2024. He is a former assistant coach at JMU.
• The NCAA also honored the late Charlene Curtis, the former women’s basketball coach at Radford, with the Gerald R. Ford Award. She was the first African-American women’s basketball coach in the ACC, at Wake Forest. In the ceremony, family members of Curtis mentioned one of her former star players – Harrisonburg High grad Stephanie Howard, who played nine years in Switzerland after starring for the Highlanders.