How Sports Explains the World
Campside co-founder Matt Shaer on a sports show that delivered highly entertaining, bite-sized portions of narrative nonfiction
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts and business.
In early 2023, the team over at Meadowlark Media came to us with an idea: They wanted to launch a podcast series that would live in the space between daily sports news and longer-form documentary shows. Story arcs would be deeply reported. They would be smart and occasionally funny and always moving. Like This American Life or Radiolab, but for sports.
The show would be called Sports Explains the World, and it would have a very specific global frame: Each episode would be datelined from a different part of the world, and explore the messy intersection of sports, politics, identity, and power. A single host, Sam Dingman, would serve as presenter for the series as a whole, but reporting and writing duties would be doled out to a stable of veteran journalists.
For help bringing the whole thing to life, we worked with two veteran freelance producers, Tommy Andres and Mac Montandon. Tommy and Mac, in turn, worked in partnership with Meadowlark’s Gary Hoenig and Bradley Campbell. Because Meadowlark was also producing a series of companion video documentaries under the Sports Explains the World banner, some topics were determined from the start.
But others needed to be developed and reported in-house, and cranked out at a daunting volume and pace––the initial season order was for 30 episodes of roughly 30 to 45 minutes a piece.
But the logistics weren’t the only hurdle. We also needed to think about audience and approach. After all, diehard sports fans tend to have commensurate levels of sports knowledge––we wanted to be able to dig deep enough to surprise and entertain them.
But we also wanted to capture the imagination of listeners who possess only a passing familiarity with, say, the career of Magic Johnson or Wayne Gretzky’s still unsurpassed 51-game scoring streak. Accessibility, in other words, was as important as brevity.
More than two years on, I remain extremely proud of the results, and the wide range of perspectives we were able to include. In one of my favorite story arcs, for example, reporter Kerry Seed reconstructs the unlikely emergence of NBA fandom in China—a story that begins long before Yao Ming. Televised games popped onto state-run Chinese stations in the early 1990s.
In an episode called “If A Tree Falls,” Rachel Miller‑Howard looks at the complex history and future of Stanford’s famous marching band. And in the multi-part “Mighty Bucks,” husband-and-wife team Sean and Louise Flynn explore the impact of a professional hockey team (and a 5,000 seat stadium) on the tiny North Carolina town of Spruce Pine.
Ultimately, the Sports Explains the World series ran for two seasons on the Wondery network. It wound down after an astonishing 46 episodes, and a handful of accolades, including a silver award from the Sports Podcast Awards.
To me, it proved that you could have it both ways, editorially speaking, when it came to sports content: You could create the kind of prestige narrative nonfiction that Campside and Meadowlark are known for, and deliver it in bite-sized portions. And you could capture an audience hungry for depth and intelligence when it comes to sports media.
But the greatest reward for our team came from reading the emails from listeners who found in the show something they couldn’t find elsewhere––a series that was a little bit nerdy, extremely ambitious, and always provocative. “I like the idea that sports can be more than just scores or trade rumors,” one fan wrote. “It can also be a metaphor for the world, and a way of understanding and exploring it.”
Maybe some day, the series will be revived. Email us with questions or comments: questions@campsidemedia.com.
We hope to see you inside the tent again soon. Subscribe now for updates on Sports Explains the World and all of Campside’s hit shows.
Matt