The story of how Christopher Liermann became the voice of Bay Port sports started 12 years ago in the office of former principal Mike Frieder.
Liermann’s future wife, Whitney Barnes, had been hired as an agriculture education teacher at the school in the summer of 2014.
It was the first time Liermann had heard of Bay Port, even though he graduated from Kiel and grew up on a farm just outside Manitowoc.
Liermann met with Frieder and former Bay Port athletic director Otis Chambers and told them his idea of doing online broadcasts of Pirates sports, starting only with football to see how it did. He had experience in the business at a young age. It included serving as the sports director at WRFW while at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls before graduating in 2013.
“At that time, I didn’t even know people did that,” Frieder said. “You’d listen to the radio for some games, but on the internet? OK. How does that work?”
Frieder told him he thought it was something they could do after listening to Liermann’s proposal.
Liermann told him it would be easier to call a game with two people and wondered if Bay Port might have another person in mind to join him for broadcasts.
That’s when Frieder uttered the statement neither he nor Liermann will forget.
“I will do the first few with you until we find somebody,” Frieder told Liermann.
Frieder instead has become the John Madden of Bay Port football, sticking around as the color man in the booth even after he retired last summer. His screams during big moments can’t really be heard from miles away, even if it sounds like it.
Football broadcasts at the school soon turned to basketball and hockey in the winter, baseball and softball in the spring and almost every sport in between.
Liermann celebrated his 1,000th career game at Bay Port this past winter.
He has broadcast every sport but tennis – it presents a logistics issue on several fronts – but the plan is to do it for the first time this fall.
Bay Port grows audience for athletic events
Bay Port Radio wasn’t exactly a smashing success when it debuted for the 2014 football season, which happened to be the senior year of San Diego Chargers fullback Alec Ingold and the junior season of Jacksonville Jaguars offensive lineman Cole Van Lanen.
There were issues to fix, including the Week 1 game at De Pere when Frieder’s headset was under his nose the entire game instead of in front of his mouth.
Any time Frieder wasn’t talking that night, listeners were tricked at best into believing there were swirling winds and at worse that a tornado was about to hit.
The entire 13-game football season that year was heard on 3,638 devices, an average of 280 per game.
A Week 6 contest against Green Bay West had 55 devices tuning in. There were just 28 for a win against Sheboygan North two weeks later.
Still, it had an impact. There wasn’t anything like it in the area at the time for high school sports.
A radio or television station would broadcast a game every Friday, but nobody was devoting all their time and resources into covering one school.
“Obviously, things grew,” said Liermann, who works for the Howard-Suamico School District in Building and Grounds as well as the Nutrition Departments as the district driver. “The first year wasn’t great. But as years went along, people would go home and, on a Saturday morning, would listen to it.”
Bay Port operation expands during pandemic
The entire broadcast changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
With fans and loved ones not allowed to attend games for some of the sports early on, many schools started to live stream events so they could watch.
Bay Port went from audio only the first six years to providing a picture to go with its commentary.
Liermann also started to broadcast games on YouTube, which made them accessible to people anywhere in the world.
The football viewership numbers have exploded in recent years.
It went from those fewer than 4,000 total devices for football that first year to 159,236 in 2025, including averaging 5,800 for each regular-season game.
Nine of the 14 games totaled more than 6,000. The semifinal playoff showdown against Muskego pulled in 48,021.
“It’s cool to see how you can connect and grow with the community,” Liermann said.
That’s the best part for Liermann. He’s not doing this for the revenue he generates from sponsorships, although those have grown from a handful to a dozen.
He puts in a lot of hours. He puts thousands of miles on his automobile, almost 5,000 to be exact in 2025.
But that dedication is rewarded when just one grandparent who can’t watch their grandchild play can now do it from a thousand miles away.
For six years, the grandparents of former Bay Port girls basketball coach Kati Coleman listened to every game while at home in Kansas.
When Liermann covered a lacrosse match earlier this month, a grandmother tuned in from Canada.
When former football standout and 2020 graduate Max Meeuwsen played, his older brother, Quinn, listened to each one of his games for three seasons while stationed in Japan as a member of the Navy.
All offered to listeners for free.
“Chris was always adamant that he didn’t want to charge,” Frieder said. “That was a real big deal to him. It still bothers him when he sees these people making profit, and quite honestly, his company [NEW Sports Radio] probably could make a lot more money if he would charge more for advertising or even if you charge a dollar a game, when you think about how many people watch our stuff.
“It was never a financial thing for the district. It was more of a way to get our product out there. For grandparents and foreign exchange kids across the world, just to listen for people who couldn’t come to the games.”
During football last season, Bay Port had listeners from 48 states and 16 countries.
It’s not just Pirates supporters who tune in.
The school once received an email from a basketball player at Sheboygan South.
“I just wanted to pass along how much of a pleasure it was for not only my parents but my grandparents to have the announcing for the game,” the student wrote after his team played Bay Port. “My grandma doesn’t have the greatest vision for the small pixels of the TV, and in the last couple of games was wondering what was going on sometimes. Your play-by-play commentary was a blessing for her.”
It’s another reminder that what Liermann and his Bay Port friends do matters to people.
“We interact with them,” Liermann said. “That’s what makes us unique, too. Essentially, on a Friday night football game we are a talk show with a football game in the background. We are different because we interact with people, and to a point, that does take away from the broadcast quality itself if you are looking at broadcasters.
“But we genuinely interact through email or Twitter or Facebook with all of our people.”
Christopher Liermann gives back to Bay Port and students
Liermann has allowed students with an interest in journalism the opportunity to practice their play-by-play or work on the production.
The list is long, far too long to name everybody, but it includes Tyler Britz (2015 graduate), Zach Abfall (2015), Jonny Samp (2017), Sam Plumb (2020), Preston Cedergren (2020) and Cole Krznarich (2025).
Connor Olson, who is a junior this year, is an undisputed MVP behind the scenes.
Liermann often will say there is not a better way to gain experience than learning to do something and doing something to learn.
He also has had several parents, teachers and administrators help.
Michael Plummer, who had three kids graduate from Bay Port, is invaluable as the camera man during games. He will even do color commentary for some sports, including teaming with Liermann for the Bay Area Ice Bears’ WIAA state championship win last month.
Liermann is even a mentor for students from other schools.
When Dom D’Angelo was a sophomore at Green Bay Notre Dame and the voice of Triton Sports Network, it was Liermann who showed him how to work in the business and with different technology. He was the one who helped teach him how to prepare and run a production.
D’Angelo is a freshman at Drake University in Iowa and calling athletic events at the school.
He will be the play-by-play announcer for the Green Bay Blue Ribbons baseball team this summer.
Perhaps the biggest thing Liermann has done for D’Angelo is away from the booth. He often brings new opportunities to him or provides feedback on something D’Angelo did. He’ll even send him news about things happening in the state.
“I jokingly have said that Chris has kind of been my agent for the past couple of years,” D’Angelo said. “He’s a tremendous guy, a dear friend and a phenomenal broadcaster. What he has built at Bay Port is as good as any high school sports production anywhere. I feel privileged that I have gotten to work with him and continue to do so.”
Liermann started an annual golf tournament that raises money to give scholarships to students attending college for journalism.
He also started the high school categories for the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association student awards for excellence.
Liermann won a few broadcasting awards while in college and felt high school students should get the opportunity to be involved.
For somebody who didn’t even know where Bay Port was on the map, Liermann has had a unique impact on the school.
“He is really good at what he does,” Frieder said. “No offense to Northeastern Wisconsin sports, but I truly believe if Chris wanted to be a full-time announcer for somebody, he could do it. His play-by-play, he is one of the best that I’ve listened to.
“Chris has kind of grown to be the voice of Bay Port. I’ll call him that now. It has taken off at other places now, too. Notre Dame is doing it and De Pere is doing it and Kiel is doing it. I don’t think those schools would be doing it if Chris didn’t start doing it at Bay Port.”
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Christopher Liermann has become ‘voice of Bay Port’ for Pirates athletics
Reporting by Scott Venci, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
