Parents and alumni hear teams over phone

Quakers fans listen to plenty of basketball and football games over the phone through Team Line. C'mon baby--call now. Only 50 cents a minute. You can listen as long as you want. Call TRZ. The pitch may not be quite this seductive, but TRZ Sports Services, the Akron, Ohio, company that offers "Team Line" phone broadcasts of Penn games, is hooking alumni right and left. Reports sent to TRZ's 263 client universities show that Penn teams are the 14th most popular in the nation. In the Ivy League, Penn ranks third behind Princeton and Harvard, which are sixth and ninth in the nation, respectively. "Alums are all over the place--they love to listen," said Athletics Marketing Coordinator Katrina Dowidchuk. Alums aren't the only ones. Athletics administrators at both Princeton and Harvard speculate that many who use Team Line are faraway mothers listing for Junior's name in the broadcast. TRZ charges listeners 50 cents per minute for the first hour and 20 cents per minute thereafter. Callers are required to buy at least 20 minutes. A TRZ official said 76 percent of the money goes to pay costs. The remaining 24 percent is split evenly between TRZ and the client university. Dowidchuk said she did not know the average length of a Penn Team Line call, but said "certainly people have listened to the entire game." Despite this, profits remain negligible. "Nobody gets rich off Team Line," said Princeton Associate Athletic Director Kurt Kehl. "We don't do it for the money, we do it for the exposure." Indeed, Harvard Sports Information Director John Veneziano estimates his school's annual take in the low hundreds of dollars. "We look at it as a service," he said. Both Kehl and Veneziano said that's Penn's Team Line rankings probably suffer from its lack of a hockey team. Penn's Team Line serves only men's football and basketball, while Harvard and Princeton also offer hockey coverage. Team Line has student support, too. At Harvard, fans once demanded Team Line coverage of an event not covered by local radio, where TRZ gets its broadcasts from. Several students with no radio experience heeded the call and broadcast the game exclusively for Team Line. Team Line, which also offers over 350 professional teams, is at 800-846-4700. The Penn access code is 5653.