There is more to a game than what’s left out on the field and the score after the final buzzer rings. The voice behind a great call is key.

Bill Courtland, CSUN’s public address (PA) announcer, has always been told he has a great voice, but his plans didn’t always involve sports announcing. Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, Courtland is a CSUN alumni who majored in English Literature, who had ambitions of becoming a court reporter.

“I knew from the time I was in high school that I wanted to become a court reporter for my day job,” Courtland said. “I was just one of those people who could type a million words a minute on a typewriter.”

He attended Merit College of Court Reporting, later teaching those skills and eventually founding the Donna Cole School of Court Reporting in the Valley alongside his business partner.

However, mother nature had plans of her own on the day the school was set to open.

“The day we got the place all built out and ready to go, and the day we were supposed to open was the day of the Northridge earthquake, ” Courtland said. “That’s the universe telling you, ‘You know what? Maybe this isn’t going to work out for you.’”

When he turned 40, he was juggling multiple day jobs and decided it was time to use his voice and knowledge to broadcast sports. To get his foot in the door, Courtland walked over to a local hockey rink in Simi Valley and asked if they had a broadcaster – they did not.

This led to his first broadcasting job, which turned into a prominent ongoing career.

He later took a position at CSUN as the women’s basketball play-by-play announcer, when internet radio was becoming popular.

“After the 2003 season with the women, the men’s coach asked if they could get me to do men’s basketball also,” Courtland said.

He announces pretty much any sport – if he’s needed, he’s there – though people can find Courtland most often at men’s and women’s volleyball and basketball.

Out of all the sports Courtland works with at CSUN, his favorite is men’s volleyball due to his own time playing for the Matadors during the 1979 and 1980 seasons, after playing previously at LA Valley College.

While he’s spent a good chunk of his career analyzing sports, Courtland said he wouldn’t trade anything for the experiences he had in playing sports growing up.

Although he’s a current announcer at CSUN home games, Courtland has also spent time in the classrooms. With his court reporting background and experience with machine stenography, Courtland started using voice recognition software for the National Center on Deafness at CSUN to transcribe class lectures into text. He acknowledged his love for working within education was greater than working in the courts.

“Working here in the classrooms where you reach the end of the semester and a kid turns to you and says, ‘Thank you so much for being here, I could not have gotten my degree without you,’ it’s like, wow, that’s super,” Courtland said.

When young people ask Courtland for guidance on how to break into the industry, his advice is simple. Although a key method to getting involved in sports is knowing people, he expressed the importance of making one’s self known.

“It’s knocking onto doors, don’t be afraid to hear a no and don’t ever take that for a final answer,” Courtland said. “Well, sometimes you have to, but sometimes that just means just move on to the next target.”

After having worked numerous jobs both in and out of the sports world, Courtland realized he truly loved PA announcing.

“It’s a kind of a job where, you know, I’m not getting rich doing this, but the rewards are plentiful,” Courtland said. “It’s communicating that emotion in your voice, that excitement in your voice that, you know, helps the crowd decide if they’re going to listen to you or not.”