History

Joe Wells first manned the microphone at the Hobart Little Field at the age of 10 while his father coached his brother's minor league teams.  As several parents did not want to volunteer to take over the microphone, Joe found that he could walk into the scorebooth any day of the week and garner the announcing duties.  Even at this young age, he was already a fan of Jack Brickhouse, Jack Buck and was aware of the voices of Mel Allen (This Week in Baseball) and John Facenda (NFL Films).

Joe began his formal broadcasting education at Hobart Sr. High School as a member of the HTV Program.  Student's in this program produced public access programming for the local cable television system that promoted the happenings at the Hobart Schools.

With experience logged so early, Joe received a performance based scholarship to Vincennes University where he majored in Broadcast Production Technology, then added a minor emphasis of Small Business Entreprenuership.

While at Vincennes University, Joe was able to amass hundreds of hours of on-air time as a radio and television presenter.  Joe also began his love of play-by-play announcing, calling the shots for the Vincennes University Trailblazers men's and women's basketball programs as well as for area high schools on the universities commercial stations, WFML & WVUB.

While home for summer breaks, Joe interned at his hometown broadcast facilities including WWJY (Crown Point), US Cable Television (Merrillville) and WJOB (Hammond).

After graduation, Joe was offered a position as Sports Director for US Cable of Northern Indiana.  It was his nightly duty to inform the region about the local sports happenings.  Joe was a welcomed sight at area fields and sports venues as he was dedicated to positively promoting the area's athletes.  During this time Joe also manned the microphone at WWJY radio in the mornings as a news reporter and also called play-by-play for the US Cable Game of the Week, a freelance position that he would hold for over 10 years.

During this time, Joe was also a regular on the airwaves of area radio stations during the nighttime sports shows.  He also gained a partnership and founded the Regional Radio Sports Network*

During the early 1990's, deregulation of the broadcasting industry hit full swing and US Cable was bought by TCI, who sold to AT&T who eventually sold the operations to Comcast.  These changes saw the 'consolidation' of the various local origination production operations.  Local news and sports production ceased, however the 'Game of the Week' broadcasts continued until 2001.

During these years, Joe put all of his efforts into his radio production business and could be heard several nights a week, broadcasting local sports programs from Fort Wayne to Whiting, South Bend to Rensselaer.  Joe was in charge of the broadcast productions while his partner spearheaded the promotional efforts.  Seeing competition from several forms of print media, RRSN began publishing a monthly high school sports magazine and two annual preview magazines.  Joe became the editor and greatly enjoyed his time constructing the publications.

With the changing marketplace and partnership issues, Joe decided to leave RRSN and concentrated his efforts as a freelance voice-over talent, for-hire sports announcer and independent producer.

Joe began AnnouncerJoe.com after manning the microphone for Illiana Motor Speedway in Schererville, Indiana.  This weekly gig re-ignited Joe's passion for live public address announcing and he could often be found at area youth and semi-pro venues with his laptop computer chocked full of sound effects, bringing that 'BIG LEAGUE' sound to the masses.