Becoming the voice of FC Cincinnati: How Tom Gelehrter bet on himself and won big

On a summer night in 2015, Tom Gelehrter was standing by himself in the driveway of Jeff Berding’s Mount Lookout home, waiting.

It had been just a few weeks since Gelehrter quit his job at the University of Cincinnati as the athletic department’s director of new media to start his own production company, 4th Floor Creative. Gelehrter had a wife and two young kids at home but was ready for a new challenge. He was confident he could create something new, become his own boss and still make things work for him and his family.

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Lingering outside an empty house as the daylight slowly dissolved, one couldn’t blame Gelehrter if he were secretly questioning that decision.

Berding came racing home, finally, about 7:30 p.m., after putting in a full day at his job as director of sales and public affairs for the Cincinnati Bengals, apologizing profusely for making Gelehrter wait. Both men were following up on leads. Shortly after leaving his previous gig, a few friends from UC started telling Gelehrter about rumors regarding a top-secret professional soccer team coming to Cincinnati. Berding, at the helm of said top-secret soccer team, was in the market for some branding and video production work. He had quietly hired Dan McNally and Jeff Smith away from UC to work in the front office of the unannounced franchise, “and I believe Jeff Smith was the one who told me about this ‘Tommy G’ guy,” Berding recalls. “He was also going out to do his own thing in the video space, and Jeff said that I should meet him.”

The two sat down at the kitchen table overlooking the backyard, and Berding laid out the whole plan and idea for what would become FC Cincinnati, including what he would need from 4th Floor Creative as far as branding and video. Gelehrter, a longtime soccer fan, was well aware of the sport’s professional failings and misfires in the Cincinnati region over the years, but he was more optimistic about this attempt when he heard that Berding and Carl Lindner III were the chief principals involved. Plus, his company was brand new, and he wasn’t really in a position to pass up a potential new client.

Their conversation and recommendations of his newly hired employees satisfied Berding enough to move forward with Gelehrter and 4th Floor Creative’s services. Much of the discussion that night focused on the team’s announcement and unveiling, including an introductory hype video and supporter campaign. Berding does vaguely recall the conversation turning toward the team’s radio and television broadcast, an idea still in the early stages but something Berding felt was going to be an important aspect of the team’s marketing strategy.

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“I didn’t know this at the time, but he had done play-by-play broadcasts, and I think he did tell me in the first meeting that he wanted the opportunity to do the play-by-play,” Berding says. “Candidly, I didn’t have anyone else in mind.”

Berding can’t help but laugh, thinking back on that meeting and knowing what he knows now.

“It is rather unusual to find someone who can do your video branding production, who can also produce, oversee the production of your broadcast, and by the way happens to be quite capable with play-by-play,” Berding adds, still somewhat incredulous three years later. “It 100-percent fell into my lap.”

From a very young age, Tommy Gelehrter subscribed to the notion that when it came to sports, those who can’t do, broadcast.

“I had a moment, first- or second grade, when I realized I wasn’t very athletic,” Gelehrter says. “It’s not good when you’re fouling out of church league basketball games.”

He grew up in Shaker Heights, just a few minutes southwest of downtown Cleveland, a fan of the Browns, Indians, Cavaliers and all the baggage that came with it.

“It taught me heartbreak at a young age,” Gelehrter says.

Still, he was a die-hard. His family would drive to the Richfield Coliseum to watch Cavs games and the Force, the city’s indoor soccer team during much of the 1980s. His mom remembers a young Tommy reading the sports section of the newspaper as early as 6 years old. One day, while watching the old NBA Inside Stuff with Ahmad Rashad on TV, there was a segment about Sportscaster Camp of America in Long Beach, California.

“That was me. I like to talk,” Gelehrter says. “I told my mom, ‘Forget soccer camp or computer camp or whatever. I want to go to sportscaster camp.’ ”

He did, for a number of years. He even went back and worked as a counselor when he was older. It was an incredible experience. The camp had professionals come in as speakers – including all-timers such as Bob Costas, Roy Firestone, Chick Hearn, Bob Miller and Brian Wheeler. Gelehrter got to call NBA Summer League games (which used to be held at Long Beach State University) or sit in the otherwise empty football press box of Angel Stadium and “announce” Anaheim Angels games with fellow campers.

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“Those cassettes still live somewhere, in a very dark place,” jokes Gelehrter, who went on to study broadcast journalism at Syracuse University. “But that camp certainly opened all the doors to my broadcast career.”

A friend he met through the camp connected him with Mike Waddell in 2002, shortly after Gelehrter graduated from Syracuse. Waddell was working in the athletic department at the University of Akron and offered Gelehrter a gig doing radio play-by-play of Akron women’s basketball for $35 a game. Gelehrter worked mornings at a coffee shop, then made the often cold and snowy drive in his Suburu Legacy back-and-forth between his mom’s house in Cleveland and the campus in Akron. He usually spent more in gas than he made to call the game. He did it for four years, during which the women’s basketball program posted a 17-95 record.

“Those are the experiences that teach you everything and make you appreciate simple things, like better production or a real roster. You figure out what kind of broadcaster you want to be,” Gelehrter says. “I never once thought, I shouldn’t be doing this.”

He picked up a few other gigs with Akron along the way – play-by-play for men’s soccer, backup on men’s basketball, studio host for football and the coaches’ radio shows – and even got up to $75 a game, if his memory serves. Then Waddell called him in 2006 and said he had another job. Waddell was going to the University of Cincinnati and Tommy was coming with him to serve as “director of new media,” a full-time gig and brand-new position.

“We’re going to figure it out,” said Waddell, who also added a caveat. “You’re name is Tom now, it isn’t Tommy anymore.”

Gelehrter started at UC on Aug. 6, 2007, interviewing head football coach Mark Dantonio and safety Haruki Nakamura on his first day. He quickly built out the media section of gobearcats.com and later Bearcats TV while calling play-by-play for men’s soccer – led by a promising Jamaican forward named Omar Cummings – and women’s basketball. He eventually worked his way up to football sideline reporter on radio calls and the occasional ESPN TV broadcast, as well as Bearcats games and coaches shows on Fox Sports Ohio.

“When you work with Brian Kelly, Butch Jones, Tommy Tuberville and Mick Cronin, you learn a lot about interviewing,” says Gelehrter, who, despite Waddell’s decree, came to be known best as “Tommy G” by Bearcats fans and his Twitter followers. “By the time I left, we were streaming 130 events a year and posting 600-some on-demand videos. And that was literally built from scratch.”

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He loved the work, but felt a pull to try something different, something new. Driving home late one night in January after a Bearcats game – with his wife, son and a two-week-old newborn at home waiting for him – he called a friend looking for advice. It was during that conversation that Gelehrter got the idea for what would become 4th Floor Creative, a sports video production company named in honor of his now former fourth-floor office in UC’s Richard E Lindner Athletics Center.

“I hung up the phone and thought, Huh, I’m going to start a business. I don’t know how to start a business, but I’m going to,” Gelehrter says. “At 6 a.m. the next morning, the baby wakes up, and I look at my wife and tell her I’m going to quit my job.”

His wife, Marissa, was fully supportive – though she did request that he wait until she returned to work from maternity leave.

“I think if you ask anyone who knows me really well, they wouldn’t say I’m impulsive,” Gelehrter added. “I would say it’s very out of character for me.”

Ignorant as he might have been from an entrepreneurial standpoint, he was confident in the idea and the model. He knew from his years working in collegiate athletics – particularly the still-developing area of in-house video production – that there was a market for outside firms that teams or programs could contract for things like hype videos, graphic design, website management and photography. They were all the things he built at UC.

“That was my business model, my pitch – I want to take something off your plate,” Gelehrter says. “I want to make your life easier.”

He bought a bunch of How to Start a Business books from Amazon and picked the brains of several local business owners he had met through his time with the Bearcats. One of those meetings, with photographer Brett Hansbauer, turned into a business partnership. The two landed a couple early jobs through existing relationships with Xavier University and the American Athletic Conference, but there were plenty of rough days too. One particular gut-punch came when they lost out to a competitor on a big-time regional client Gelehrter was banking on.

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“It crushed me. I left the office and went home and sobbed for like a half-hour. All the emotions of, What have I done? I have two kids, I left a job with a paycheck and really good benefits for a job with very little paycheck and very average benefits,” Gelehrter says. “Then I took a shower and came back to the office more determined. When I get my teeth kicked in, I bend down, pick them up, jam them back into my gums and go find five more opportunities.

“And then in parallel with all of this, I start getting phone calls about this professional soccer team that no one knew about.”

Kevin McCloskey still sends Gelehrter a text anytime he drives past Newport Pizza Company. It’s where the two met for the first time in late 2015 after Berding suggested McCloskey as a potential color commentator for the FC Cincinnati broadcast booth. Gelehrter actually drove to the lunch through a blizzard from a 4th Floor job in Mason.

Berding originally met McCloskey years ago through his job as executive director of Kings Hammer Soccer Club, a local youth soccer player development organization based in Wilder, Kentucky. McCloskey is an Irish international who came to the United States to play college soccer before coaching at Xavier and Northern Kentucky University and then playing for the erstwhile Cincinnati Kings, the city’s first United Soccer League franchise that folded in 2012. Berding felt McCloskey’s first-hand knowledge of the game would pair well with Gelehrter’s play-by-play experience. The pair clicked immediately.

“The conversation was very natural,” McCloskey says. “We have a good sense of humor with each other, and really hit it off from the get-go.”

The pair’s chemistry was vital. Berding was adamant from the moment FC Cincinnati was announced in August 2015 that he wanted the matches broadcast in some televised or streaming capacity as a way to build and market the club’s brand.

“It was a very big decision, and a risky one, too, because we were committing to invest a lot of money in television knowing that even if we sold the commercials, it was still a negative financial proposition,” Berding says. “But we thought that building our brand through television and the credibility that being on TV would bring was in effect a two-hour commercial every time.”

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It was one of the many ways FC Cincinnati immediately distinguished itself among USL franchises and signaled its grand ambitions. Despite the fact that many USL matches are now available nationwide via the ESPN+ app, the club’s deal to simulcast home games during that opening season on local WSTR 64 TV and ESPN 1530 AM radio was pioneering, as was the resources they invested in the production side. 4th Floor Creative teamed up with Regional Emmy-winning producer David Ashbrock, with Gelehrter and McCloskey calling the game from the booth and Lindsay Patterson working as the sideline reporter.

“The plan was to be Cincinnati’s professional soccer franchise, not a minor league one. And I think when you watch on TV, you see a very professional broadcast,” Berding says. The club now broadcasts every game, home and away, on WSTR 64 (with some of the away matches called remotely), in addition to a weekly radio fan show hosted at MadTree Brewing featuring players and coaches, all with Gelehrter shepherding the brand.

“Tommy really is the face of the broadcast,” Berding adds. “People recognize him and his voice as that of FC Cincinnati. I can tell you that I’ve received numerous compliments from folks in (Major League Soccer) and the larger soccer community, beyond Cincinnati, who feel our TV broadcast is very, very good. That is something he gets great credit for.”

Gelehrter is always quick to share any praise with McCloskey, Patterson and Ashbrock, among others, and all of whom will add that much like the product on the field, the broadcasts have improved measurably over the club’s three seasons. The coaching staff, led by head coach Alan Koch, has aided that as well. Koch, since taking the helm prior to FCC’s second season, has encouraged Patterson to ask him questions on the sideline during games, and is always offering McCloskey and Gelehrter insight into his thinking and tactics during the week, mentioning specific things to keep an eye out for during matches. The impact of that, and the broadcast team’s increased chemistry, comes through.

“Tommy certainly creates the picture. He’s really good at telling the story of the game, and he sets me up well, brings me in at the right times,” McCloskey says. “I think I’ve been able to help him understand some of the nuances, and I’ve noticed the last couple years his eye has gotten better for the game. His preparation helped me prepare further as well. We’ve really developed a good relationship on- and off-air. I probably talk to Tommy every day.”

Local, national and international interest in the club has risen to historic levels and Gelehrter’s own profile has gotten a boost as well.

“My street cred with the local millennial crowd has skyrocketed,” he quips.

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But what many fans, even the die-hards, probably don’t realize is the degree of Gelehrter’s off-screen influence on the club, via that initial connection through 4th Floor Creative. The company produces the match broadcasts but also creates or contributes much of the club’s branding and original content, including intro hype videos, halftime television features and the Major League Soccer announcement.

The partnership came together at the perfect time for Gelehrter, giving him a steady client – even if he couldn’t initially imagine how steady – that commissioned a wide variety of projects, all of which contributed to a portfolio that helped land more business. Local clients include Kroger, Northern Kentucky University and the Western & Southern Open, but 4th Floor Creative has also worked with the University of Georgia, University of Tennessee, Virginia Tech University and the broader United Soccer League.

Gelehrter admits he lost about half the money he invested into the company in that first year of 2015, but it’s been a profitable business ever since. 4th Floor now has four employees, in addition to Gelehrter and Hansbauer, based out of an office in Norwood. FC Cincinnati is a big part of that.

“The reality is that everybody needs video. That’s why I knew the business could be successful and why I’ve always believe in our model,” says Gelehrter, reflecting on some of those tougher times in the early going. “Everybody has shit days. But we have a lot more better days than shit days, and we learn from the shit days. That’s what makes you better.”

FC Cincinnati’s first-ever home match occurred on April 9, 2016, a 2-1 victory over Charlotte in front of 14,658 fans.

“It was freezing cold, 38 degrees. Kevin and I were all bundled up (in the booth),” says Gelehrter, thinking back to the moment. We’re eating lunch at Revolution Rotisserie in his home neighborhood of Pleasant Ridge, just a few miles up Montgomery Road from the 4th Floor Creative office. “In about the 80th minute of the game, I actually shushed Kevin on the broadcast, and you can hear ‘FCC! FCC!’ echoing throughout the stadium. It still gives me chills to this day.”

No one knew then what a phenomenon FC Cincinnati would become, Gelehrter said. The almost 15,000 in attendance that day may have been much better than what many expected, but less than three years later, the team has surpassed that mark in season-ticket holders alone.

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“I still have season tickets. I’ll give them to clients, give them to friends,” Gelehrter says. “But I actually have a harder time giving them away now, because all of those people got their own season tickets.”

The story of the club’s rise from plucky upstart to American soccer Cinderella and soon-to-be MLS franchise has been well documented, though only a select few got the same complete, insider view of that journey the way Gelehrter has, starting that summer night in Berding’s driveway. He’s watched all of it from his perch in the announcer’s booth, and is already playing an integral role in discussions about the club’s future broadcast plans and what the setup will look like in the forthcoming soccer-specific stadium. The front office is still finalizing details of next year’s local broadcast deal for when the team enters MLS play, but all signs point to the existing crew remaining intact.

“My last day at UC was May 5, 2015,” Gelehrter says. “On May 29, 2018, I’m part of this team’s Major League Soccer announcement. That’s awesome.”

Gelehrter can – and gladly and regularly will – rattle off the club’s countless other memorable moments, replete with exact dates and other precise details. The 2016 friendly against Crystal Palace. The 2017 U.S Open Cup wins over Columbus Crew and Chicago Fire. All the way through the 2018 table, capped by a USL Regular-Season Championship and ongoing streak of 23 straight matches without a loss. The latter mark resumes this Saturday with an opening-round home playoff matchup against Nashville SC, and with an eye toward a potential USL Championship Cup run.

It’s all contributed to the perfect pairing of team and invested spectator, both behind the scenes and very much in front of it.

“The both of us are so into the game, so that’s been neat to experience that with him,” McCloskey says. “Some of the important goals that have gone in, Tommy hasn’t been able to control himself. He’s hit me with elbows, kicked me, slapped me. It shows that we really still are fans of the game and this club as well.”

Those moments are the reason Gelehrter drove that old Suburu Legacy through the cold and snow of Northeast Ohio to call college basketball games for $35 a pop. Why he came to Cincinnati almost on a whim and built a media office practically from scratch. Why he left a good, stable job to bet on himself and start something on his own. Why he still gets choked up thinking about that first “FCC!” chant on a blustery April evening.

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“I tell people all the time: Do whatever it takes. Don’t sleep. Work your tail off. Make whatever you can get. I understand you have to pay rent and eat – I get that – but figure it out. Be kind. Impress people,” Gelehrter says. “It goes back to what I told my wife when I wanted to start 4th Floor Creative: I realize I have a family, two kids, a mortgage, but I am going to do whatever it takes. If that means I have to get three jobs again, like I had 10 years ago, that’s what I’m going to do. But I’m confident in this.”

Gelehrter pauses and leans back in his chair, realizing the irony of his statement.

“Turns out, I do sort of have three jobs again, I guess,” he says.

Not that he’s complaining.

(Top image: Tom Gelehrter, left, interviews FC Cincinnati forward Fanendo Adi on a Downtown Cincinnati rooftop. Photo courtesy 4th Floor Creative/Tom Gelehrter)

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