Raycom Sports

Raycom Sports is an American syndicator of sports television programs. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and owned and operated by Raycom Media. It was founded in 1979 by husband and wife, Rick and Dee Ray. Since its inception, it has produced and distributed football and basketball games from the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) of the NCAA. It was also a distributor of games from the Southeastern, Big Eight, and Big Ten conferences, as well as the now defunct Southwest Conference.

History

Founding

Rick Ray was a program manager at WCCB in Charlotte when he proposed that WCCB produce more basketball games. Ray thought that they would be very profitable for WCCB, given North Carolina's reputation as a college basketball hotbed. However, station management turned him down. Not long after setting up shop, Ray put together an early-season basketball tournament which became the Great Alaska Shootout.

Partnership with Jefferson-Pilot Communications

Two years later, Raycom made what would prove to be its biggest splash when it teamed up with Jefferson-Pilot Communications to take over production of ACC basketball games. The package had begun in 1957 when Greensboro businessman C. D. Chesley piped North Carolina's run to the 1957 national title to a hastily created network of five stations across North Carolina. It proved popular enough that it expanded to a full-time package of basketball games the following season. Chesley retained the rights to ACC games until 1980, when the conference bought him out and sold the rights to MetroSports of Rockville, Maryland. Some ACC games were telecast by Raycom alone in 1980 through four or five television stations in North Carolina, including WCCB.

Virginia Tech

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, popularly known as Virginia Tech, is a public, land-grant, research university with a main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, educational facilities in six regions statewide, and a study-abroad site in Switzerland. The commonwealth's third-largest university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 225 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to some 29,373 students and manages a research portfolio of US$513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.

The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors, which serves as the university's governing body, comprises 13 members who are appointed by the governor of Virginia; the president of the state's Board of Agriculture and Consumer Services serves ex-officio as the 14th voting member. Serving as non-voting representatives are the presidents of the university's Faculty Senate and Staff Senate, who serve ex-officio, and an undergraduate student and a graduate student selected through a competitive review process. The endowment is managed by the Virginia Tech Foundation, and as of 2015 topped US$817.8 million.

Raycom Media

Raycom Media, Inc. is an American television broadcasting company based in Montgomery, Alabama. It is owned by its employees.

History

Although Raycom Media dates its birth to 1996, the core of the company was formed in 1992 when Atlanta native Bert Ellis formed Ellis Communications, which eventually controlled 13 television stations and two radio stations.

In 1994, Ellis bought Raycom Sports, a 15-year-old sports marketing firm. Two years later, Ellis sold Raycom to a media group funded by Retirement Systems of Alabama, who had bought Aflac's broadcast division and Federal Broadcasting's TV Group a few months earlier. The three groups merged to form Raycom Media. In 1998, Raycom merged with Malrite Communications, owner of five stations in the South and Midwest.

In August 2005 it acquired The Liberty Corporation and in the process sold a dozen of its stations to Barrington Broadcasting. The merger closed at the start of 2006.

On November 12, 2007, Raycom announced its intention to acquire the television broadcasting properties of Lincoln National Corporation's Lincoln Financial Media—three television stations (see table below), plus Lincoln Financial Sports—for $583 million. As of January 1, 2008, Lincoln Financial Sports was officially merged into Raycom Sports.