Sarah Kustok details last-minute NCAA Tournament booth shakeup

Sarah Kustok knows what the NCAA Tournament means. She’s played in it. She knows the feeling of a season coming down to a single game, the weight of everything that gets poured into a year showing up in one afternoon in March. She carried that into the Westwood One radio booth in Buffalo last Thursday — alongside two partners she hadn’t planned on working with — after finding out that morning that her original partner would be shifting gears.

Kustok joined Nick Kostos on You Better You Bet to walk through what that day looked like, and the short version is that nothing about it went according to plan.

Everyone listening to Tuesday’s First Four had heard Brian Anderson grinding through the Texas-NC State broadcast on truTV alongside Charles Barkley and Dick Vitale on a voice that had almost nothing left in it. The hope was that a day of rest would get him back. It didn’t, and when the call came to hold Anderson out of Thursday’s first round, the reshuffle moved Jason Benetti, who had been set to work Westwood One radio alongside Kustok in Buffalo, to fill Anderson’s spot alongside Jim Jackson and Allie LaForce.

Kustok found out at practice at the arena.

“I think the thing about that we’ve all learned in this broadcasting business is that you gotta be ready for anything and always be on your toes,” she told Kostos.

In her case, that meant calling four first-round games with Pat McCarthy and Sam Neidermann, two partners she hadn’t prepared to work with on the same day the change took effect. The fact that it came together the way it did says something about how tight this world actually is. She and Benetti are both from the Chicago area, had crossed paths through NFL and college basketball work before any of this, and she wasn’t surprised watching him step into a national television assignment on a day’s notice.

“He’s the ultimate pro,” she said, a sentiment Anderson echoed when he returned for the second round, saying there were very few people who could have handled it as well.

Kustok had her own version of that same day to get through, though. She carried that into four games alongside McCarthy and Neidermann — McCarthy, the son of Tom McCarthy and the voice of the Mets on Audacy, handled the afternoon session, while Neidermann, the voice of North Dakota State, joined her for the night. Neither was the partner she expected to have, and both were working a stage significantly bigger than their usual assignments.

“Definitely is a long day, that first day calling four games,” Kustok said.

But the way she talked about it, the juice of the tournament took care of the rest. The NCAA Tournament has a way of doing that, of making a long day feel like something worth having rather than something to survive, especially when the people around you rise to the moment.

“Pat was tremendous, Sam was amazing,” she added. “I now have new friendships with new play-by-play partners.”