Many guys think a dream job is to be a sports reporter/play-by-play/anchorman. They may think twice if they had the schedule of sportscaster Dave Eanet.
Forgive us for singling out someone who works for a sister Tribune entity, but this guy kept popping up live at all points of the clock. Schedule-wise, he’s an animal.
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Eanet, 48, can be heard covering sports on WGN-AM 720 at 5 in the morning, and that might be after doing the play-by-play for Northwestern University’s basketball radio broadcasts well into the night. He also does Northwestern football.
Eanet can be seen Sundays doing Fox Sports Net Big Ten women’s basketball games, and he throws in an occasional fill-in job on WGN-Ch. 9’s newscasts.
Toss in the constant traveling for games, check-ins with coaches and players, and other reporting assignments, and Eanet is working seven days a week, and sometimes getting only a few hours of sleep a night.
Naturally, Eanet, who has been in radio for roughly 25 years, loves it. “I don’t complain about it because I understand it kind of goes with the territory,” said Eanet, who sneaks a nap or workout here and there. He also has a wife and two teenagers to keep up with.
Ted Albrecht, Eanet’s broadcast partner on Northwestern games, calls him “the ultimate professional in the industry” who is “maximizing his earning potential based on a point in his life. Because he ain’t going to be doing this six years from now.”
Eanet–who has had two tours with WGN under his belt, from 1984 to ’88, and from 1996 to the present, with a stint at WBBM-AM in between–carries this schedule from late summer, when football season starts, to the end of basketball season. So summers carry a more normal five-day-a-week schedule, which gives him some time to hit a few golf balls.
Eanet’s wife of 18 years manages to deal with his schedule. And though Karen Eanet said it’s “tough” when she has to go to some events without him, she also sees a larger picture.
“I’m used to putting up with it because of how he feels about what he does,” she said. “He’s happy doing his job, where a lot of guys work an actually longer day and don’t like what they do.”
“I feel that for me, it is really the best of all possible worlds,” Eanet said of his job. “It’s easy in this business to get kind of pigeonholed into one particular role, and that’s all you get to do. And I think I would get really bored if I didn’t have the variety.”