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SportsGrid Speaks With Brian Snow, The World’s Most Excited High School Basketball Announcer

Getting in touch with Brian Snow (pictured above) yesterday wasn’t especially easy. Sure, part of that was trying to arrange a conversation over Twitter in which the participants are separated by a time zone, but the bigger culprit was viral internet fame. We were far from the only ones who wanted a piece of Snow yesterday – “I had like three other people call me … this afternoon has been nothing short of nuts,” he told us after one missed connection – because he’s the guy who made this call:

Fantastic. And that enthusiasm’s not fake. How do we know? Well, when we asked Snow if he’d be interested in chatting with us (following him identifying himself via his Twitter page as the man who made the call), the first thing he said back was, “Hell yeah man!!!” And it kept going from there. We asked him about the game. Was it the most exciting finish he’d ever seen? “In 16 years [of announcing], it’s in my top 5,” he said, sounding like someone whose heart was in every one of those shrieks he emitted.

Of course, it’s not like Snow reacts like this for every game – he said this was the most enthusiastic call he’d ever given. That was thanks to it being a playoff game, the furious comeback by Marist, the winning team… not to mention that Marist was an underdog. He harbored an unmistakable fondness for that underdog, whether it was in calling their performance “what greatness is all about” during his call, or in talking to us, describing how Curie perhaps looked ahead past Marist, while Marist’s focus was squarely on Curie.

There was something else we had to find out, though. As many who talked about Snow’s call noted, the football team at the very same Marist High School was just last fall involved in a thrilling finish of its own – a finish that just happened to inspire another call with which the internet immediately fell in love, in which a man excitedly intoned, “PY-RO-TECHNICS!!!!!!!.” From there, the natural question: was it Snow both times? Deadspin said it wasn’t sure, so we asked the man himself:

“The pyrotechnics call was not me – I wouldn’t have even used the word.”

Too bad – can’t call ‘em all. But Snow must know that. After all, if there’s one thing we know about him, it’s that when the moment presents itself, he calls the hell out if it.

Photo via Indiana University Northwest