KCTV-5’s Dani Welniak to be part of college football history when she calls bowl game
Sports director Dani Welniak won’t be working at KCTV-5 on Dec. 21 because she’ll be busy making college football history.
For the first time, an NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision bowl game will have a national radio broadcast featuring an all-female crew.
It’ll happen at the Cure Bowl in Orlando, Florida, where Welniak will be the color analyst, while Jamie Seh will do play-by-play and Melanie Newman will be the sideline reporter.
“At some point when this is not making history that’s when we know we’ve done our jobs,” Welniak said Thursday on KCTV’s 6 p.m. newscast.
Welniak was hired at KCTV in June 2016 and also worked four seasons as a sideline reporter for the Chiefs Radio Network.
Before becoming a broadcaster, she played for the Dallas Diamonds in the Women’s Football Alliance. A receiver, she was part of the Diamonds’ Super Bowl championship team in 2008.
“My real dad played linebacker for the University of Nebraska and my stepdad played for the Dallas Cowboys, so I’ve kind of grown up around football and I’ve always loved it,” Welniak told the Dodge City Daily Globe in 2011. “You know being a girl and being in Texas, the opportunity to play football is extremely slim. And if you are going to play, you’re probably a kicker. So when this opportunity came around and they are like ‘you can play with women,’ I had to seize it. I had to be able to understand it like my dad and stepdad understood it.”
The Cure Bowl will pit Georgia Southern Eagles against Liberty. The broadcast will be aired nationally on Sirius XM Radio and the TuneIn Radio app.
In a news release, the Cure Bowl said it had raised more than $3.7 million for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation since 2015.
“The FBC Mortgage Cure Bowl has been working to take this concept to completion and team up with BowlDayRadio to bring together Jamie, Dani and Melanie for this historic broadcast,” Cure Bowl Executive Director Alan Gooch said in a news release.
“Jamie has been an ambassador for our game since its inception and was recognized as a Cure Bowl Community Service Soldier in 2017. Melanie provides a great perspective and has first-hand experience covering the Liberty Flames this year, while Dani’s experience speaks for itself as a sideline analyst for the Kansas City Chiefs Radio Network and a former captain of a professional football team.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 10:13 AM.
