CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When you first turn on a Carolina Panthers radio broadcast this year, you’re going to hear an unfamiliar voice.
That voice — the new voice of the franchise — belongs to radio play-by-play announcer Anish Shroff. In a position that has only changed over once every 14 years, Shroff will take over what he calls a dream job. His first game for Carolina will come Saturday, when he calls the Panthers’ preseason 1 p.m. contest at Washington.
Shroff already does play-by-play for college sports on ESPN and will also keep that TV job, which will necessitate some busy travel each weekend during the fall. Frequently, Shroff plans to broadcast a college game on Saturday for ESPN, then fly or drive to wherever the Panthers are to call their Sunday game.
It’s the sort of ambitious schedule that Shroff, 40, has long envisioned. He has imagined becoming a team radio play-by-play man ever since he and his brother were listening to baseball games at night in their shared bedroom in New Jersey.
The Shroff family didn’t have cable. So unless the game was on network TV, Anish Shroff was listening to it on the radio, forming pictures in his mind based on whatever the play-by-play announcer was saying. The words, to him, felt like magic.
“You’d get a feel for the cadence,” Shroff said, “and the words they would use. The way they would find different ways to say the same thing over and over. There was a science to it — the basics. The score. The situation. The moment. But there was also an art — the manipulation of language. I loved all of that.”
Shroff wanted to practice his own play-by-play, even then. So as a kid, Shroff would do play-by-play of video games he and his brother were playing, or of his friends’ pickup basketball games.
“He was good at it even back then,” Nilay Shroff, Anish’s younger brother, said with a laugh. “But it could be a little annoying.”
The Shroff parents, Hitesh and Nikita, immigrated from India in the 1970s. Their two sons were then born and raised in New Jersey. As a sports junkie from an early age, Anish Shroff loved the library, where he wanted to routinely go to check out sports-related books. His mother made him a deal, though — for each sports book he read, he had to read one non-sports book that she picked out.
“I hated it at the time,” Shroff said, “and I love her for it now. I’d read something like ‘Great Football Teams from the 1970s’ and she’d go, ‘OK. And here’s Wuthering Heights.’ But then one day we’re broadcasting a game in a backdrop of a snowstorm and I could say, ‘It’s like somebody ripped a page out of Emily Bronte.’ So thanks, Mom.”
Building the Panthers booth
Shroff has lived in Charlotte since 2011, but he knows you probably don’t know who he is just yet. Or maybe you have some vague familiarity with him to his ESPN work, but aren’t sure how to pronounce his first name (it’s Ah-NEESH).
And that’s all fine, Shroff said. He’s ready to prove himself to Panthers fans as a worthy successor to Bill Rosinski (the Panthers’ play-by play voice for the franchise’s first 10 years) and Mick Mixon (the voice of the Panthers for the past 17).
“I think the challenge for me in this first year is because we will have so many voices in the room,” Shroff said. The Panthers regularly employ a three-man radio booth, but Shroff will be the only on-air constant inside that booth. Former Panthers Jake Delhomme and Jordan Gross will share the role of primary analyst, as they have done for the past several years, with Delhomme doing a few more games per year than Gross.
The secondary analyst role, usually manned by radio personality Jim Szoke, will now be split between Szoke and former Panther linebacker Luke Kuechly, who is new to broadcasting and will do seven games this season.
That means five different people will be in the broadcast booth for the Panthers’ radio network this year (and six if you count former Panther Kurt Coleman, who will sub in as a primary analyst for the three preseason games). Reporter Kristen Balboni will also be a constant from the sideline. In other words, Shroff is going to be a bit of an air traffic controller in the booth, and he’s not working with the same planes every week.
“I do feel a broadcast booth is judged as a group,” Shroff said, “and we have to connect as a group. I know Luke is connected with the Panther fan base. Jake is. Jim Szoke is. Jordan Gross is. I’m not — yet. So I still have to do that. And I have to find a way to do that through them. Those first few games — building that rapport, building that chemistry — it’s not going to be just a flick of a switch, or what Mick had with those guys after working with them for a long time. So this may take a few weeks.”
Shroff, 40, has worked with many analysts over the years calling college sports like football, basketball, baseball and lacrosse. Most recently, at ESPN, he broadcast more than a dozen college football games last year alongside Mike Golic Jr., including the Duke’s Mayo Bowl in Charlotte on Dec. 30, 2021, where he and Golic made social media waves by occasionally dunking random foods like Oreos and glazed doughnuts into mayonnaise in the booth and eating them. (“The first time the Oreo hit my lips, I thought I was going to puke,” Shroff said. “And then, surprisingly, it actually went down OK. Believe it or not, the aftertaste saved it.”)
Golic said that the best play-by-play analysts are like talented point guards in basketball — able to create moments for others to shine, but also able to call their own number and create for themselves when needed. Shroff, Golic said, can do both.
“You need to understand what a big moment needs,” Golic said. “Anish always does.”
Meticulous preparation is a key for Shroff, Golic said. Shroff watches film on both teams before every game, trying to get a feel for what they will do in certain situations. And then he keeps the broadcast booth loose, often making himself the butt of self-deprecating jokes. Shroff was unafraid to take a candid picture last year showing that he had to stand on a box to appear closer to Golic’s height in one on-camera shot, then gladly sent the photo to me after Golic told me about it.
Shroff graduated from Syracuse, which has produced a host of national sportscasters, including Shroff’s all-time favorite as a listener — Bob Costas. “I felt like Bob Costas made me smarter as a viewer,” Shroff said.
Shroff has studied play-by-play announcers far more than the average fan has. He believes there are “three stages” of a football play-by-play person and illustrated them in our interview using an example when a team faces a 3rd-and-8 from the other team’s 45-yard line.
“So let’s say they call a run play for three yards,” Shroff said. “The reactionary play-by-play guy says: ‘Why’d you run it there? It’s 3rd-and-8!’ The guy who’s a little bit ahead of that says, ‘All right, they picked up three yards. It’s 4th-and-5. Do you go for it?’ Whereas the guy who is even further seasoned and anticipatory, before that third-and-8 ever happens, will tell you a run play might be on the table, because this is four-down territory.”
Sopranos and Springsteen
Going into sportscasting is an unusual choice for someone of South Asian heritage, as Shroff readily admits. The other 31 NFL radio play-by-play announcers are all white males. Shroff said he believes that Indian families themselves are sometimes a barrier to entry for young adults thinking about entering the sports media world, preferring to push their children toward safer and more high-paying jobs in the medical or IT fields.
“I talk to a lot of these South Asian kids where they want to do this,” Shroff said. “They are weeded out by their own. They say, ‘My parents said they’d cut me off (financially).’... When I was growing up, I would express this as my interest to other South Asians and people like me and it didn’t resonate. It was more, ‘Well, why do you want to do that? You mean your parents are letting you do that?’”
In that way, along with a number of others, Shroff was lucky. His father, Hitesh, was an accountant by training, but when he came to America, he reinvented himself as a wedding photographer. His mother Nikita, who died when Shroff was 17, encouraged her older son’s desire to do something in the liberal arts field, while also allowing his younger brother to embark on a more traditional path.
“I was the tech guy, he was the artistic guy,” Nilay Shroff said of Anish.
The Shroffs grew up in what Anish calls “Sopranos New Jersey,” so much so that the place where they regularly went for ice cream was used in the final scene of the last episode of the HBO show “The Sopranos.” Favorite New Jersey son Bruce Springsteen was an inspiration for Shroff, too. After studying sports journalism and broadcasting at Syracuse, Shroff went to Yakima, Wash., for his first “big” job in the business.
“I used to listen to Springsteen everyday before I went to work in Washington,” Shroff said, “to remember a little of my New Jersey roots. But so many of his songs are about getting out of New Jersey, and escapism, and finding that next adventure while breaking the shackles of where you’re from. So that was my juice every day before work: Born to Run.”
A quick rise at ESPN
Shroff’s rise was fairly meteoric. ESPN noticed him and hired him shortly before his 26th birthday. He was a studio anchor on some ESPN shows across its family of networks, but wanted to do play-by-play. A senior coordinating producer named John Vassallo decided to give Shroff a chance calling lacrosse games.
“My first one was a Georgetown-Notre Dame regular season game in Washington, D.C.,” Shroff said. “I had probably six weeks to prepare for it. I knew the name of every player’s grandmother by the time I showed up.”
Impressed, Vassallo offered Shroff more work and became a mentor in the business to him. Vassallo encouraged Shroff to move from the ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., to its satellite studios in the Charlotte area, where, as Vassallo said, “Anish could be in a slightly smaller pond and be a bigger fish faster.”
Vassallo said of Shroff’s style: “I think he’s got a gifted blend of strong pure play-by-play mechanics and the ability to weave a story. He doesn’t get in the way of the game — he makes sure that’s still primary — but he can give you a precise nugget on a player at just the right time. His style reminds me of Sean McDonough (one of ESPN’s leading announcers in a variety of sports), who does all that really well, too.”
With the Panthers, Shroff has become a familiar sight at training camp in Spartanburg, watching practices and chatting up players and coaches each day as he prepares for the season. When he’s back home in Charlotte, his time has mostly been spent with his wife Faye — a former TV anchor herself who he met at his Yakima, Washington, stop — and their 4-year-old daughter, Athena.
Shroff said he can’t wait for his first NFL season, and hopes for many more to come after that. As always, Shroff said, he will be in search of a big moment, a possible crescendo, a chance to weave his own magic with words.
“Football is such a great opportunity to do that,” Shroff said, “because it has so many pivot points in the course of a game. Every third down in football is a pivot point. It’s a nexus…. So you’re always building drama, you’re always anticipating. You’re always forecasting and there always is that sense of what comes next. And for us, it’s selling those moments, and selling those pivot points. To me, that is storytelling.”
