Meet the Press: Jake Brandt goes the extra miles to insure lasting UND connection

Uh, headphones?

Skates?

A two-billed hat that reads insurance agent by weekday and hockey analyst by weekend?

Jake Brandt never tires of the inevitable banter that comes with plastering his name on his own State Farm insurance office in Brainerd, Minn. In fact, he embraced the 2011 advent of the long-running ad campaign, concomitant with the time he established his office.

“I get a lot of ‘what are you wearing, Jake from State Farm’? questions,” he confessed between chuckles during an exclusive phone chat with Pucks and Recreation.

“I actually enjoy it. I have a lot of fun with it. I have some ‘Jake from State Farm’ T-shirts that I give to a lot of people, and a pair of khakis.

“It’s been something that I’ve used to get some free advertising. It’s great.”

Leave to a former college hockey goaltender to guzzle the nectar of a good-natured occupational jesting. Entering the fraternity of crease custodians has a way of preparing one for that.

It also let Brandt enter a spontaneous side gig at the Midco Sports Network with less anxiety than he might otherwise. A 2005 graduate of the University of North Dakota, he saw action in 60 games for the squadron formerly known as the Fighting Sioux. That included the majority of the workload as a sophomore, then a virtual 50-50 split with Jordan Parise the next season.

Yet despite majoring in communications as an undergraduate, he admits to having no formal broadcasting experience prior to the fall of 2015. His continued involvement in hockey as a Bantam AA coach one state over, not to mention his ties to the proud UND program, were the attraction when Midco needed a new color commentator.

A domino phenomenon in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks helped to precipitate the opportunity as well. When native son Tyler Palmiscno, who overlapped with Brandt at UND for three years, left his post as the East Grand Forks High School boys’ coach, fellow alumnus and EGF athletic director Scott Koberisnki filled his skates.

As it happened, Koberisnki had been complementing play-by-play voice Dan Hammer in the Midco booth. But with ample scheduling conflicts ahead, he unplugged that gig.

“So they kind of brainstormed at UND and thought, ‘Who could we get that would maybe me colorful or would maybe come and enjoy doing this?’” Brandt recalled.

Distance would be the ostensible obstacle to dangling the offer before Brandt. Per Google Maps, the shortest drive from Brandt’s Brainerd office to Ralph Engelstad Arena covers 219 miles and takes an estimated three hours and 34 minutes.

That notwithstanding, Brandt said, “I am very passionate and loyal UND fan, and I thought it would be a great way to get reconnected back in and go to a bunch of games.”

Adjustments and tradeoffs

On no less than a half-dozen occasions in each of the past two seasons, Brandt has abbreviated his Friday at his Brainerd office. Covering a two-game series in Grand Forks entails taking off between 11 and noon, ensuring one hour to kill and check into a neighboring hotel before entering “The Ralph” and full broadcaster’s mode.

Brandt credits the men’s hockey programs sports information contact, Jayson Hajdu, and Grand Forks Herald beat reporter Brad Schlossman with supplying ample information for him to hit his analyst’s pond sprinting. He also cultivates firsthand information through a phone chat with Fighting Hawks bench boss Brad Berry on the Wednesday or Thursday before a home series.

Working with first-year play-by-play announcer Alex Heinert, he proceeds to mold the material into a fast-paced session of on-the-fly puck talk.

“The greatest thing about it is, depending on what happens on the ice, we kind of get paid to talk and have fun with it,” he said.

But there is also a symbiotic dependency between the duo. Heinert, who stepped in when Hammer pursued other opportunities, needed a commentator of Brandt’s background for his first wave of exposure to the UND hockey community.

“I’m always taken aback at how he knows everyone we come across,” Heinert told Pucks and Rec. “Parents of players, old teammates, lifelong UND fans…Simply put, Jake knows everybody and everybody knows Jake, and in most cases, it’s not just on the surface level. To me, that level of investment in a place over nearly two decades is special.

“In terms of hockey sense, Jake’s brilliant. He breaks down what happens in a play, tells you why it happened and usually tells you what could’ve been done to prevent it.

“It’s only his second year in an analyst role, so he’s still working on telling that to the viewers in the most concise manner possible, but it’s still pretty impressive to hear him digest everything’s that happening on the ice and on the benches in real time.”

Brandt, in turn, admits that he is still grasping the finer protocols of live game telecasts.

“It’s way more difficult than I think people think just because when you watch someone, people that have been doing it on the networks make it look so easy because they’re so good at it,” he said.

“The hardest thing is when you have your headset on and they’re talking to you in your ear but you have to continue talking and that was a little bit of a learning curve, just because you’re taught not to talk when someone’s taking to you. You have to listen to what they’re saying, because they’re telling you how time until a commercial break, and not try to lose track of your thought process.”

This season, there is at least no longer the nag of imminent commitments elsewhere. Weather conditions have tended to dictate how soon Brandt reverses his commute. If the forecast prompts caution, he may depart at 2 a.m. Sunday following the second installment of the series. Otherwise, the itinerary calls for a more leisurely return to reality.

He had more to consider, and less time to build up to the Saturday tilt the way one would on the Hockey Night In Canada crew, when he also wore the Brainerd Bantam AA coach’s cap. In 2015-16, he occasionally squeezed a morning game elsewhere in the state or across the border between Parts I and II of the UND weekend. He usually followed his hasty return to Grand Forks with another bolt to another Brainerd commitment before finally hustling home. 

Just like Koberinski the year before him, Brandt had to choose between the coach or commentator bill on his second-job lid.

Unlike Koberinski, he kept the latter. That choice, combined with the grueling commute it entailed, “speaks volumes of the place North Dakota hockey has in his life,” Heinert said.

Blue-paint patriotism

Brandt, originally from Roseau, Minn., still holds a pair of less consuming puck positions in his home state. He sits on the Let’s Play Hockey magazine’s Minnesota Minute Men club, which votes on the scholastic Mr. Hockey and Frank Brimsek Awards. In addition, he keeps his skates sharp for Monday night shifts as a goaltending instructor for various Brainerd teams.

If the Midco job underscores his devotion to his alma mater, the other rink-based gigs he retained for 2016-17 speak to his loyalty to the clan that every former and current goaltender comprises. The Brimsek Award is Minnesota interscholastic hockey’s answer to college hockey’s Mike Richter Award.

Both honors have, at one time, gone to Zane McIntyre (nee Gothberg), a Thief River Falls product and UND alumnus. Brandt had coached McIntyre in the Bantam ranks, but barely missed out on calling any of his college career. McIntyre inked a professional contract before what would have been his senior season in 2015-16, Brandt’s first in the Midco booth.

But that twist also allowed Brandt to witness a storyline that hit home. McIntyre’s exit left a vacancy to be filled by one of three successors who combined for a paltry 43 minutes and 19 seconds of prior collegiate experience.

All of those minutes and seconds belonged to Cam Johnson, but fresh off a draft selection by the Philadelphia Flyers, Matej Tomek was an eye-catching candidate. Lone upperclassman Matt Hrynkiw was raring to finally earn his stripes as well.

But Tomek’s preseason injury bumped Johnson from his presumptive backup post. He would need to shake off an October injury of his own to ultimately wrest the No. 1 job back from Hrynkiw.

By season’s end, after back-to-back Frozen Four semifinal losses failed to consummate McIntyre’s ornate tenure, Johnson was an NCAA champion backstop.

“That was the big question mark coming into last year,” Brandt said. “Zane had left, they needed goaltending and it turned out that with Cam Johnson, there was no falloff from when Zane left.”

He added, “Cam Johnson’s been brilliant this year in my eyes. (The team) just lost a lot (of skaters) from last year. Defensively, they lost a lot as well, so his job is a lot tougher.”

Brandt cited “not being a homer” as the toughest aspect of his current job at Engelstad Arena. While he was referring to the need to tame his built-in loyalty to his alma mater, he could just easily be talking about lifetime goaltender’s fraternity membership.

Putting it another way, he is as much a member of what the Twitterverse dubs #goalienation as he is a part of UND’s all-time roster.

Brandt believes those in UND’s annals got hooked on the hashtag through Karl Goehring, who backstopped the program’s previous national title in 2000 and now volunteers on Berry’s coaching staff. Both masked men, who missed overlapping at the school by one summer, regularly post original stick salutes to their successors or retweet comparable content.

“I think the goalie nation thing is one of those things where everyone is kind of obsessed with being on our own,” Brandt said.

On their own in body, yet unified in spirit. And it is not exclusive to the crest and colors on one’s jersey, either. Case in point: Atte Tolvanen’s recent bid to break Blaine Lacher’s NCAA shutout streak record.

The Northern Michigan contemporary matched one mark of five straight 60-minute goose eggs. But the former Lake Superior State standout’s run of 375:01 without a setback remained on top when Tolvanen’s streak ended at 339:05.

There was added excitement around Grand Forks when Johnson went on his own lengthy tear of perfection last winter. Johnson’s streak of 298:25 enveloped four straight shutouts between December 2015 and January 2016.

In both cases, ex-netminders were hanging on every second, as it meant positive publicity for the position.

 “We all want to see goaltenders succeed and do well and make us proud,” said Brandt. “So the fact that when you wear the pads and you’ve been a part of that, you can appreciate when you see a goaltender who is having success.

“You make sure to watch it just because you gravitate towards goaltenders and success. We pay attention to the success that they have. The goalie nation thing is just that, we are a little bit single out, people tease us and joke about us. We kind of embrace it a little bit. We’re a little different and a little odd because we take great pride in the position that we play.”

Only the best

Despite the experiential discrepancies between his past and present roles in “The Ralph,” Brandt insists that playing net “was a more stressful job.” But having now catered to a home arena mass and a home television audience for roughly the same number of games, he appreciates the sustained pleasure of catering to Fighting Hawks (nee Sioux) fanatics.

Brandt likens the scrutiny of the Grand Forks fans to those of the Montreal Canadiens in that they “expect nothing but the best, and if you’re not, they let you know a little bit about it.”

Given that Montreal’s Bell Centre boasts the largest seating capacity in the NHL, the comparison has credibility. Engelstad Arena is an anomalous mansion of a college hockey venue that accommodates 11,643 spectators.

Those who have a share of the power over what happens between the boards aim to sustain a high volume and positive tone for two-plus hours. If all goes according to their plan, they will literally set off fireworks at the final horn.

For those working the booth, the task is merely sustaining concentration and talking over the clamor. No worries about talking down to the viewer in this market.

“When we do our broadcasts, we know we’re going out to a lot of people just because of the fan base that UND does have,” Brandt said. “It’s not like we are telling the audience anything they don’t know because they are so knowledgeable, so there’s no way to go sugarcoat it when they’re playing poorly, because they know.”

Because of that, not unlike the skaters who service them, Hawks fans will pounce on any elevated challenge beyond their turf. Besides a slew of Frozen Four appearances in recent years, they have flocked to NCHC road games and regular-season neutral-site contests in other time zones.

Madison Square Garden hosted three games hosting a combined six college hockey programs this season. Of those six teams, North Dakota made the longest trip. Yet the crowd of 11,348 for its bout with Boston College eclipsed the 10,148 that took in New Hampshire-Cornell and dwarfed the 5,002 that turned out for Wisconsin-Ohio State.

Early this February, tickets went on sale for an Oct. 27, 2018 date with the Minnesota Gophers at Las Vegas’ Orleans Arena. With another 20 months left before that game, all 7,773 seats have already been claimed.

“Not many college programs can go out to New York and pack as many people in a Madison Square Garden venue and have it be a success like UND can,” Brandt said. “Not many people can go down to Vegas and literally sell out a 7,500-seat building in seconds on Ticketmaster, and that’s because of the Champions Club and the fan base.”

One’s objectivity is perfectly intact after one makes that statement. Still, as is relatively common among regional network color commentators, the inner ex-player is not always so inner.

Then again, that is what draws a man of Brandt’s ilk to a job of this nature. It will take more than a semimonthly seven-hour round trip to keep him away from Engelstad’s allure.

“We’re very proud at UND of what we put out on the ice as a product,” Brandt said. “We feel we have the best coaching staff in the country, we have the best facilities in the country, we have the best trainers in the country, we have the best sports information directors in the country, the best beat writers in our college area.”

“We gravitate toward the team,” he added. “We put a lot of pressure on the UND hockey team, but in saying that, we recruit guys that we feel can go in and have success at that level.

“I say ‘we’ (even though) I’m not a part of the team, but I’m a part of the past and tradition, and I’m one of the most loyal alums that there are, and there’s a lot of them out there.”

As far as Heinert is concerned, in the words of Prymaat Conehead, that assessment “sounds most appropriate.”

“Of course, if he wasn’t on the air, he’d be in Ralph Engelstad Arena for the majority of these games as a supporter,” Heinert said. “But we’re certainly happy with his choice to remain in the broadcast booth. He’s a great combination of a former player, proud alumnus, knowledgeable coach and passionate fan, and it shows in his call on game days.”