Meet Shawn Kenney, an Iowa native and one of wrestling's top play-by-play announcers

Jim Gibbons, the Iowa State wrestler and coach-turned-television broadcaster, was asked by ESPN to call the quarterfinal round of the 2007 NCAA Championships. Of course, he said, but once he arrived that Friday morning in Detroit, he was nervous.

Gibbons was escorted to a “bread truck,” he says now, “with a cardboard table and four black-and-white monitors, maybe six or seven inches.” He could see his breath on that chilly day in March, and he was told his call would be streamed on the internet.

“My first thought was, 'I gave up a suite ticket for this?'” Gibbons said.

Oh, and one more thing.

“I did it all by myself,” Gibbons continued with a laugh.

It went well enough that he was again asked by ESPN to call the 2008 NCAA Championships, but Gibbons had a few suggestions this time.

First, he’d like to be inside.

Second, “I’ve got a guy who could help,” he told his producers.

That guy was Shawn Kenney, the local radio guy at the Raccoon Valley Radio Network. Kenney and Gibbons, who worked in Perry as a financial advisor for a time, called a few high school wrestling events together on KDLS, including non-stop play-by-play radio coverage of the Iowa state wrestling championships at Wells Fargo Arena.

“I figured, if you can call the state wrestling tournament on radio, you can do anything,” Gibbons said. “I told Shawn, ‘I don’t know where this is going, but it’s not a bad thing to put ESPN on your résumé.’”

This week, 14 years later, Kenney is on the mic for the 2022 Senior World Wrestling Championships in Belgrade, Serbia. He's become one of wrestling’s top play-by-play voices, a go-to talent for ESPN’s networks and a mainstay on United World Wrestling’s international livestreams, which can be seen on FloWrestling this week.

This will be Kenney’s fifth time calling the world championships for UWW, wrestling’s international governing body. As the sport has grown, the lifelong Iowan’s portfolio has expanded. He calls multiple international events each year for UWW, as well as ACC and Big 12 wrestling events and the NCAA Championships for ESPN.

“He’s an easy guy to forget about, but he just does the job and does it really, really well,” Gibbons said. “He’s a pro, and our sport is really fortunate to have a guy like that.”

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Kenney's play-by-play prowess has, in a small way, helped wrestling’s rise in popularity, especially at ESPN. The 2022 NCAA Championships had three consecutive nights in primetime, 19 total hours of live coverage on ESPN networks, plus every match on every mat was available through the MATCAST viewing option on ESPN3.

The traits that make Kenney a prolific broadcaster today were apparent even back in 2008. The NCAA Championships were held in St. Louis that year, so Kenney bought his own flight down, did all his own research, and he and Gibbons called the action for ESPN360, the precursor for what is now Watch ESPN.

“He stayed on my brother Tim’s couch,” Gibbons said. “But that’s how it all got started. Since then, it’s been all about his performance.”

From Council Bluffs to ESPN: Shawn Kenney's early broadcast beginnings

For Kenney, calling the NCAA Championships with Gibbons was a full-circle moment. He grew up watching Gibbons and Tim Johnson call the state wrestling tournament on Iowa Public Television each year, fueling his own fascination with sports broadcasting.

Born and raised in Council Bluffs, Kenney’s father always had the radio tuned into whatever sport was on. He loved the play-by-play guys and started mimicking them by broadcasting family game nights and solo basketball games in his bedroom.

“I had a nerf hoop and would broadcast to myself,” Kenney said, laughing, “I always wanted to be a sports broadcaster. I remember sitting on the porch with dad, listening to ballgames. That was my influence.”

As he grew older, he gravitated toward Pete Taylor, the iconic radio voice of Iowa State football and basketball. He liked both the simplicity of Taylor’s calls and the emotion with which he spoke. He called Taylor “the common man’s broadcaster.”

“Everybody could relate to Pete,” Kenney said. “And he use fancy words to tell you that things weren’t going well for Iowa State. I always appreciated that.”

Kenney graduated from the University of Iowa in 1999, then landed at Raccoon Valley Radio in Perry. He's been the sports director there ever since, even as the ESPN and UWW gigs arrived and multiplied. He picked up play-by-play reps calling high school football on Friday nights, basketball twice a week, plus wrestling every February.

The St. Albert grad didn't grow up a wrestler — “More of a football player,” he says — but his two brothers wrestled, and he always respected the sport because of the mental and physical discipline required to succeed.

As such, when it came time to call a wrestling event, he prepared accordingly because he felt the sport deserved it.

“As I developed my career, I figured, why not bring a professionalism to play-by-play for wrestling?” Kenney said. “I didn’t think the sport had that at the time. I made it a point to really study it.

“I can’t tell you how much time I spent watching film for different techniques, styles, things like that, to really learn the sport so I can deliver an accurate picture for the audience.”

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That immediately resonated with Gibbons, an NCAA champion wrestler for Iowa State in 1981 and a national title-winning coach for the Cyclones in 1987. He's since become a two-time winner of the National Wrestling Media Association’s Broadcaster of the Year and a renowned wrestling analyst on Big Ten Network.

“He’s a modern-day version of Pete Taylor,” Gibbons says. “He’s dogged in his preparation for the big moments. I’m a big fan.”

Kenney has been a regular on ESPN’s networks since that 2008 national tournament. His duties now include track, tennis, even basketball and football — he called Iowa State’s season-opening 42-10 win over Southeast Missouri State at Jack Trice Stadium — but he says he treasures his wrestling opportunities the most.

One of his main gigs has been the play-by-play for Friday Night Duals on the ACC Network, an ESPN offshoot, as well as the ACC Championships and the occasional Big 12 dual. He often works with Rock Harrison, another rising star in wrestling media.

“I knew he was the real deal when he told me he called wrestling on the radio,” said Harrison, a former Virginia wrestler who worked as a Division I official before becoming a wrestling analyst for ESPN. “I enjoy working with him. We have great chemistry.

“He is a jewel to have at play-by-play because, one, he understands the sport, but also, he truly enjoys the sport. Analysts often get the attention, but an analyst can only be as good as their play-by-play guy, and Shawn makes my job easy.”

How Shawn Kenney's play-by-play has helped wrestling grow at ESPN

Most will remember the 2018 NCAA Championships as the year Spencer Lee and Yianni Diakomihalis won national titles as true freshmen, or perhaps because Penn State outlasted Ohio State to win a tremendous two-team title race.

Gibbons remembers 2018 because of Kyle Conel.

Conel, Kent State’s 197-pounder, entered the tournament that week in Cleveland unseeded. He reached the semifinals out of the pigtail match and took third after beating Ohio State’s top-seeded Kollin Moore twice — all after nearly walking away from the sport.

More specifically, Gibbons remembers Conel because of Shawn Kenney.

Kenney’s preparation for the NCAA Championships includes compiling information on all 330 qualifiers. Yes, really. If a wrestler has a moment on the broadcast — scores in dramatic fashion, records an upset, anything — Kenney is ready with their story and any relevant information.

So when Conel pinned Moore in the quarterfinals that Friday, Kenney not only had a great call — “The shocker of the weekend comes from Kent State!” he said on air — but also helped producers feed Conel’s story to sideline guy Quint Kessenich, who conducted the live post-match interview.

“He puts in the work, man,” Harrison says. “He looks up every wrestler, all 330. Gets information on all of them. He has a binder with everything. Like 70%, he’ll never use, but once that moment comes, he’s ready. That’s what separates him from everybody.”

“Nobody knew anything about that guy except the most important guy,” Gibbons adds, “and that’s Shawn Kenney.”

The combination of Kenney’s work ethic and passion for wrestling led to the UWW gig. During the 2018 ACC Championships, he worked with Tim Foley, an All-American for Virginia in 2004 who later became the manager of media operations for UWW.

At the time, UWW was continuing many of its wholesale changes after wrestling was put on the Olympic chopping block in 2013. Part of that included beefing up coverage. Foley asked Kenney if he knew anything about international wrestling.

“I said, I’m probably one of the few Greco fans in the United States,” Kenney says now, laughing.

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Kenney now calls the European Championships, the Asian Championships, the World Cup, plus Olympic qualifiers, and the world championships every year for UWW. In the last 12 months, he’s been to Norway, Hungary, Mongolia, and, this week, Serbia.

At each stop, he’s used the same process that he uses for the NCAA Championships, which is the same one he uses for Friday Night Duals, ACC track meets, Iowa State football games, and even Perry High School sporting events on KDLS. He's very conscious of his role in the overall movement to continue increasing wrestling’s profile.

“So many play-by-play people want to be the star of the show,” Kenney says. “I’ve never been that way. My job is to make sure everybody knows the athletes that are competing, then they can choose who they want to cheer for. I only want to be accurate in my delivery when I share their stories.

“The passionate fan is always going to be there. Our job is, through personal interest stories and information about the sport, to draw in casual fans, and we’re moving in the right direction. ESPN has put wrestling as a priority in recent years. Every year, it’s gotten bigger and bigger.”

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In recent years, Kenney’s also had a front-row seat for some of the best wrestling in American history.

Over the last three years, the U.S. has won 34 world medals, including 14 individual golds. Last year, the United States won 15 total, five of them gold, across all three styles: men’s freestyle (7), women’s freestyle (7), and Greco-Roman (1). Both the men’s and women’s freestyle teams took second in their respective team races.

USA Wrestling is expecting another stellar performance this week in Serbia. Kenney will be ready not only with their stories, but with those of all the nearly 800 competitors that are expected to compete.

“Tonight, we close the chapter on Greco-Roman,” Kenney began the UWW broadcast Tuesday morning (local time, at least), “which is beloved here in Serbia, and for good reason. They have a chance to put a stamp on what has been an incredible three days for this proud country — a chance, possibly, to win the team title.

“If last night was any indication, it’s going to be one heck of an encore tonight to continue a great week of wrestling.”

Cody Goodwin covers wrestling and high school sports for the Des Moines Register. Follow him on Twitter at @codygoodwin.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa native Shawn Kenney is a rising star in wrestling media