Marc Herklotz, a Bellevue native, was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame Class of 2025 after a paramount career as a technical director.
Herklotz was inducted into the Hall of Fame in December in a class with folks like Lee Corso, Greg Gumbel and Pam Oliver. His 30-plus-year career as a technical director had him working at ESPN and ABC from 1989 through 2019, technical-directing Sunday Night Baseball, Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football. It led him to work events like the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics on NBC, the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics on CBS, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics on NBC.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” Herklotz said when he received the call that he was being inducted into the hall of fame. “It took me to my knees because it was the cherry on top of my career. It can’t get any better than that.”
Though you may not be familiar with the term technical director, the position controls what you see on the big screen every time you watch a sports game. They operate the video switcher in the control room, executing the director’s vision by cutting between cameras, graphics and replays in real-time to create the on-air product.
Growing up in Bellevue, Herklotz is one of six siblings who all attended Bellevue Independent Schools. Though Herklotz said he has always been a steadfast Reds fan, which he got from his grandfather, who used to carry a little pocket TV schedule around his back pocket, he said that as a kid, he never had a fleeting thought of working in sports or television.
He grew up musically inclined and initially went to college to study music. Herklotz took piano lessons on Overton Street in Newport and said some of his fondest memories were marching with the Bellevue High School band.
Herklotz said he wanted to be a band director, which is why he attended Morehead State University for its music program. As he was attending school at Morehead, he took a tour of a news station where his sister’s roommate worked.
“That was eye-opening,” he said. “She took us into a control room, and I saw the video switcher, and I just lit up. I just remember seeing that for the first time and saying, ‘that’s what I want to do.’”
After two years of studying music at the university, Herklotz changed his major to radio/TV journalism.
Fast forward to January of 1982, Herklotz was freshly graduated and on the job hunt. After trying to get a position at three Cincinnati TV stations with no luck, he landed a job at WLWT, Channel 5, the fourth station he tried. He was hired at the end of January, when the Bengals were headed to Super Bowl XVI, where they would ultimately lose to the San Francisco 49ers.
His first gig at Channel 5 was in the prop and floor department working on The Bob Braun Show. Then he moved on to ripping script for the evening news, running the teleprompter and stage management. After a while, the station started taking him to the ballparks, where he would stage-manage Reds and Bengals games.
Herklotz said that experience was an eye-opener.
“They would put you up in the booth, and the director and the producer would give you a stack of cards that you would hand to the announcers throughout the show,” he said. “You’d be on headset with the producers, ‘give this card for a promo,’ and so you hand it off to Harry Kalas, [Hall of Fame broadcaster for the Philadelphia Phillies, ] for instance, and he’d read it. You would count them in and out of breaks. So, you were, like, rubbing shoulders with famous people.”
That experience led Herklotz to “pulling cable” (the physical installation and deployment of cables from one point to another to connect cameras, audio equipment, and production trucks for live events or studio productions), which he said was real low level and the first step to get into running camera, running audio, master control, video tape and ultimately for Herklotz, technical directing.
His first technical directing job was for Channel 5 with Jerry Springer and Norma Rashid. Eventually, that turned into technical directing of Reds games and Bengals games.
Then, in 1989, he got his first call from ESPN. They wanted him to technical direct an Ohio State basketball game in Columbus. The director at the time, Kenny Fouts, who contacted Herklotz, liked his work and kept calling.
“He kept on asking for me to do his games, because a director and a technical director are like the tightest bond on that broadcast crew,” Herklotz said. “The director really, really depends on the technical director to perform his commands. It’s the director calling the shots.”
Herklotz started doing more and more shows for ESPN while still working at Channel 5, so he picked up gigs on his days off.
“I was working all my days off,” he said. “I would just trade days off, usually try to get somebody who had weekends off when most sports happen to go out and work a college football game. ESPN got Major League Baseball in ’90, and then Kenny started doing Wednesday Night Baseball for ESPN. So, he wanted me to come along to do his games, and so I did Wednesday baseball with him.”
Herklotz worked the night shift at the station, so sometimes he would sign off at 3 a.m., catch a flight to a Wednesday game, come back to Cincinnati, and rinse and repeat.
It got to a point in his career where he started to enjoy technical directing games more than what he was doing at the news station. He took the leap and left Channel 5 on his birthday in December 1990.
“I was doing Thursday night football for ESPN, college football, and then I would go out and do an NFL game on the weekend,” he said. “I was working every day.”
When technical directing, Herklotz said, you can’t hit the wrong button; you can’t make a mistake, because thousands, or even millions, of people watching the game will see it.
“It’s a complicated gig,” he said. “It’s very complicated; if you think about it too hard, it could paralyze you, because there’s a lot of advertising that goes through your fingers too.”
Herklotz’s younger brother and Fort Thomas resident, Karl Herklotz, said that when he would catch a game on TV that his brother was technical directing, it was always in the back of his mind.
“Whenever I was watching the Monday Night Football game, I knew my brother was doing it or a Sunday night baseball game,” Karl Herklotz said.
One moment in Herklotz’s career that his brother recalled as a particularly cool moment was a segment featuring Herklotz on Monday Night Football. Karl Herklotz said that when the Bengals had a night game in town, and Herklotz was working the broadcast, he would host a party at his house for the crew after the game.
“One night, he arranged for the crew to film a segment at his house for ESPN, which was special because they usually don’t recognize the behind-the-scenes staff,” Karl Herklotz said. “That time, they did the filming and showed them [Herklotz and the crew] opening the front door and capturing everyone inside before transitioning into a story about my brother. This was during the period when Mike Tirico was still broadcasting Monday Night Football.”
Even in retirement, Herklotz said he keeps up with the business. He said he has always been fascinated by the technology, but he is also immensely interested in broadcast history. He even has a museum in his basement of old broadcast equipment.
The call from ESPN to let Herklotz know he was being inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, he said, came out of the blue in the summer of 2025. He said it was completely unexpected.
Thinking about the likes of people such as John Madden, or his fellow Fort Thomas resident Cris Collinsworth, or Al Michaels, who Herklotz said he worshipped as a kid, he couldn’t believe he would be joining them in the hall of fame.
“I was looking at the resumes and going like, well, I know I had a pretty fabulous career,” Herklotz said. “Did a lot of work, it was a charmed life, to put it that way, but probably half of them [inductees] are announcers. They’re all famous announcers. They’re all recognizable in front of the camera, but it’s nice that they also include those of us behind the camera.”