For the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, a new voice will be on the radio as the official broadcaster for women’s basketball on the Lady Vol Network.
Brian Rice, a Knoxville native, will take the microphone this year after Mickey Dearstone retired last spring at the end of the 2021-22 season after 23 years. Rice will become just the third person to hold the role on a full-time basis after Dearstone and Bob Kesling. Now the current director of broadcasting for UT, Kesling handled Lady Vols basketball radio duties for nearly two decades after the legendary John Ward started calling select UT women’s games in 1977-78.
Rice will follow a legendary broadcaster in Dearstone, who entertained and charmed listeners with his precision calls, sense of humor, candid outlook and a mild degree of antipathy for certain officials.
So how do you follow a legend?
“You go and you do the job,” Rice said in an interview with Knox TN Today. “You do the job the best you can in your way with the proper respect for who came before you – but also knowing and having the confidence that it’s your job now, and you have to do it your way and your style.
“Now, my style is going to be very similar to Mickey because Mickey is from the John Ward tree and Bobby Denton school of broadcasting. But maybe you grew up listening to Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren and Ernie Johnson on the Braves network, well, so did I. We all have to figure out our own way, and our style and our own catchphrases and what we go to in certain situations.”
Rice spent the last 10 years as the radio play-by-play announcer for Lady Vol softball. He also serves as co-host of The Erik Ainge Show on the flagship station of the Lady Vol Network, 99.1 FM/AM 990. He also has been a familiar face on basketball game days over the years, whether serving as the official scorekeeper or assisting media relations at the post-game press conferences.
“Brian has done a fantastic job on the radio with Tennessee softball for many years and filling in for Mickey on some Lady Vols basketball games in the past,” Vol Network General Manager Steve Early said. “His background, experience and knowledge has uniquely prepared him for this very prestigious next role, and it is very apparent how much devotion and passion he has for the University of Tennessee and Lady Vols basketball.”
Rice graduated twice from UT with a bachelor’s degree in sport management in 2005 and a master’s degree in sport studies in 2007. He was born and raised in Knoxville and graduated in 2001 from Knoxville Catholic High School, where he served as a public address announcer at Fighting Irish sporting events. Rice, 39, lives in West Knoxville with his wife, Kelley, their 21-month-old son, Cooper, and Wembley, a Cavalier King Spaniel.
Mickey Dearstone and Brian Rice. (Photo provided by Brian Rice)
While the 2022-23 radio call of Lady Vols games will sound different this season, Dearstone served as Rice’s mentor – it was Dearstone who helped Rice get his start in radio – and the orange, as it were, didn’t fall too far from the tree.
“People shouldn’t expect a wholesale change, and that’s not I am trying to be him, it’s just that’s where I listened and that’s where I picked up on things,” Rice said. “You can be the natural choice or you can be the right choice, but you still have to actually go out and do the job. You have to go out and broadcast the games and paint the picture, and do all those things the right way.
“That’s what I’m focused on. I’m not focused on who did it before even though it’s my mentor in the business that that gave me every radio job I had until this point. I have the confidence that I’ve been taught well enough that I can go out and do things my way and the Vol Network way to paint the right picture for our fans.”
Maria M. Cornelius, a writer/editor at Moxley Carmichael since 2013, began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press. She can be reached at mmcornelius23@gmail.com.