Pattonville High School basketball players Cassie Callahan, Allyson Sanders and Tyra Brown watch the B-squad before a home game in Maryland Heights, Missouri. Photo by John Biewen.
Can a winning baseball team bring St. Louis together post-Ferguson? Can the camaraderie of a team sport make race and class status “disappear” for the kids involved or their parents?
Two new episodes produced and hosted by John Biewen, audio director of the Center for Documentary Studies, take a challenging look at the idea of whether sports unify a community.
The first episode has Biewen looking at race in St. Louis through the lens of the St. Louis Cardinals, the current favorite to win the baseball World Series. Crowds are flocking to the ballpark to see the Cardinals, but Biewen gets some unexpected answers when he asks, “Post-Ferguson, can a winning baseball team bring St. Louis together?” Listen to “Sports – The Great Uniter?” here.
Episode Two—”Friends and Basketball”—asks the question, “can the camaraderie of a team sport make race and class status ‘disappear’ for the kids involved or their parents?” Biewen hangs with a girls’ high school basketball team in suburban St. Louis, Mo., to test the idea. Listen to “Friends and Basketball” here.
The reports are part of the series called “Contested,” which Biewen describes as “listening in on life in America through sports.” “Contested” itself is part of Scene on Radio, a biweekly podcast that offers listeners a dose of audio work made at CDS—new stories produced by Biewen, the best pieces made by CDS students, and occasional gems plucked from the CDS radio archives.
“We at CDS have been making documentaries for public radio for years,” says Biewen. “We’re going to keep producing audio stories, but now first and foremost for this podcast. [Scene on Radio will feature] stories that explore human experience and the society we’re making for ourselves. In short: how are we doing? As the name suggests, this show will very often traffic in scenes—stuff happening out in the world, as opposed to lots of studio talk.”
"Contested" is focusing on sports and society, but Biewen said future series for Scene on Radio will look at larger questions of human experience and U.S. society.
Biewen’s radio work has taken him to 40 American states and to Europe, Japan, and India. He has produced for the NPR newsmagazines, This American Life, Studio 360, American RadioWorks, the BBC World Service, and State of the Re:Union. He is audio program director at the Center for Documentary Studies, where, in addition to producing Scene on Radio, he teaches audio courses to undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students. With co-editor Alexa Dilworth, he edited the book, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, now in its sixth printing.