Opened for business in 1999 when founder Charles S. “Charlie” Chitwood made the career move from being a history museum director to a full-time sports broadcaster, Chitwood Sports Media has grown tremendously in six short years. Once just the vehicle for Chitwood’s play-by-play engagements, the Jefferson, Texas business now produces nearly 150 high school and collegiate broadcasts per year.

Chitwood Sports Media owns the broadcast rights to East Texas Baptist University (Marshall, TX) athletics, LeTourneau University (Longview, TX) basketball, Concordia University-Austin basketball, softball and baseball as well as Jefferson (TX) High School athletics and the Aztec Bowl, an American football all-star game played each December in Mexico. The list of past single-event clients includes Nyack College (NY) and Linfield College (OR) for post-season basketball and softball play. Chitwood also airs the daily “SportsBeat of East Texas” on KMHT radio in Marshall and serves as the lead play-by-play voice for both KMHT and sister-station KGAS (Carthage, TX) for dozens of high school sporting events.

It was through the first Internet-only broadcast of the Aztec Bowl from Saltillo, Mexico in 2001 that Chitwood came to embrace the value of streaming-only productions. An expected audience of several hundred for three week-of-game previews and a few thousand for the game broadcast itself turned into more than 40,000 listeners nation- and world-wide. In four years of streaming the Aztec Bowl, an audience consistently in excess of 50,000 has been logged-on and listening to CSM’s live coverage of the event.

At the local level with ETBU and LeTourneau, Internet audiences have grown consistently from hundreds of listeners per program to thousands. The proliferation of personal and home computers has made Internet broadcasts almost as easy to access - certainly from greater distances - as local radio and much less expensive to produce. Chitwood Sports Media is adept at utilizing university talent or finding local play-by-play talent for broadcasts and proudly works to mentor young broadcasters hoping to enter the field.

Chitwood’s dedication to making small-school productions “as big as you want to be” resulted in his having been awarded in 2003 the inaugural “Outstanding Media Service Award” from the American Southwest Conference. A member of the American Sportscasters’ Association and a regular attendee of the Texas Association of Broadcasters’ “Sportscasters Institute,” Chitwood served in 2004 on the seminar’s play-by-play panel along with Mark Followill (play-by-play voice of the NBA’s Dallas Maverick’s), Eric Nadel (play-by-play voice of MLB’s Texas Rangers) and Roger Emrich (lead play-by-play voice for the KRLD in Dallas and Texas State News network.