Hornet Radio celebrates 10 years on the air

It started with a phone call to a coach's mom, and 10 years later, Lee Jaynes is running an internet radio station with thousands of listeners, tuning in each week for his take on Gatesville High School sports.

In 2012, Jaynes' son was still in high school, playing sports, and during baseball season, the coach's mom was going to miss a game due to illness. Knowing how much she loved watching the game live, Jaynes decided to call her from the stands and give her the play-by-play.

That was when his wife asked if he could make that a group call, since there were probably other people who would be unable to make it to the game and might want to listen in as well.

Jaynes had no idea how to do that, so he looked up "internet radio station" online, found a link, pulled out an old laptop and a cellphone earbud he had lying around the house, and set himself to broadcast.

From the first day on the air, Jaynes wanted Hornet Radio to be different.

"Professional broadcasters can be kind of boring," Jaynes said. "So, I wanted to cover the game like I'm sitting next to someone at the game, telling them about it."

He said he remembers during that first game; he was worried when his wife said her phone was "blowing up" over what he was doing.

"I said something like, 'Oh, the managers and umpires are headed to the mound, looks like someone's ready to call their divorce attorneys,' and then I saw my wife coming toward me."

Jaynes asked her if he had done something wrong, and she told him no, just the opposite, that people were loving what he was doing. That was when Jaynes decided this was something he would like to do more often, so he went to the football coach and asked if he could call some of those games starting in the fall.

His boss, David Fincher, donated a new laptop, and Jaynes found a co-host, Tyler Powell. They started broadcasting games over the internet, and the first game had over 100 listeners, with some of those tuning in from outside Texas.

"Someone told me some of those were soldiers who were deployed and were missing their kids' games," Jaynes said. As a veteran himself, who served as a nuclear, biological, and chemical specialist in the army, Jaynes knew this was a way he could give back to those still serving overseas.

The co-hosting arrangement became standard for the broadcasts, and included Gatesville sports legend Cotton Davidson, who played for multiple NFL teams and was one of the first inductees into the Gatesville sports hall of fame.

Another regular co-host was Dusty Boyd, the district attorney for Coryell County, and it was while announcing a game with Boyd that Jaynes had what he considers his most embarrassing moment on the air.

A regular feature of the broadcasts was to have people send text messages, and Jaynes or Boyd would read them out to the listening audience.

They received a text from a Gatesville police officer at one away game, who said that he was back home keeping an eye on things.

"And I said on the air that if he was bored, there was a crack house (at a certain address) he can bust," Jaynes said. That was when Boyd "looked shocked," Jaynes said, because as he explained to Jaynes off the air, there was an ongoing investigation into that location, and he wanted to know how Jaynes knew about it.

"Turns out I didn't know that was happening," Jaynes said. "I just thought that house was a problem, so I said it on the air."

Drug investigation revelations aside, Hornet Radio has continued to grow, and in 2020, due to COVID-19 restrictions, they were able to add livestreaming to the broadcast, and Jaynes invested in additional audio and visual equipment.

Before 2020, the University Interscholastic League (UIL) would not allow video broadcasting of high school sporting events, mainly due to a contractual agreement with Fox Sports Southwest, which has the broadcast rights for those games.

But since people were unable to attend games in person, that restriction was lifted, and livestreaming has been a Hornet Radio feature ever since.

Jaynes grew up playing sports all through high school and said that his favorite sport to watch and announce might surprise some people.

"Soccer is my favorite sport," Jaynes said. "It's because that's the sport I played the most growing up, and most people don't understand how complex the game really is."

Besides the broadcasts, Jaynes also hosts the "Fifth Quarter" on Wednesdays, where they feature two players of the week, and they select those players for doing something more than they normally would do on a field or court.

"If someone makes 14 tackles every game, that's not a player of the week," Jaynes said. "We're looking for someone who went above and beyond that week."

Those students receive a Hornet Radio patch for their letter jackets, and at the end of each season, the show gives out a scholarship to one male and one female athlete. That amount varies from $500 to $1,000 each year, depending on how much sponsorship money the show receives.

When Jaynes started, he never thought about sponsors, until during the first year, and a local business owner approached him and asked how much an ad would cost on the broadcast. Jaynes came up with a number on the spot. "He didn't even blink," and wrote Jaynes a check.

Other businesses followed, and those sponsorships help pay for equipment, licensing fees and gas, since Jaynes and partner Josh Godfrey cover between 6,000 and 7,000 miles each year to follow various sports.

Hornet Radio can be found on its Facebook page: www.facebook.com/hornetradiosports, and the YouTube channel is Hornet Broadcasting www.youtube.com/channel/UC5nY3xwh_37XUoI1QjZU0bg.