Jay Zawaski provides listening pleasure for Blackhawks fans in podcast world

When the Blackhawks returned to relevance in 2009 by making the Stanley Cup playoffs, local media outlets had to reacquaint themselves with not just the team, but hockey.

The Score, for one, was looking for someone on staff to lead playoff postgame coverage. But the station was practically bereft of hockey knowledge.

So Jay Zawaski raised his hand.

Zawaski, a producer at the time, had been at the station since 2001 but had done little on the air. In fact, he hadn’t been behind a radio mic since his days at Lewis University, just before he joined The Score. But he knew hockey, having followed the Hawks closely since high school at St. Laurence. So the station gave him a shot.

That knowledge, though, was nowhere to be found when Zawaski started his first show.

“Oh, my God, the terror,” Zawaski said. “I had probably 15 pages of notes, and all of a sudden they turned into a foreign language. I couldn’t read them. I was just overwhelmed by the moment.”

Jason Goff, another Score producer at the time, heard Zawaski floundering. He called in to the show as any listener would, but unbeknownst to the audience, he didn’t want to talk about the Hawks as much as he wanted to put his colleague at ease.

“He actually started interviewing me, like, ‘Hey, what did you think of that power play?’ And I started talking about it,” Zawaski said. “That gave me so much confidence because I was sensing myself doing poorly, and then when he called in, it was like, ‘OK, he’s hearing it, too. Relax.’ I will never forget that.”

The Score’s “Hockey Guy” was born. And it has been smooth sailing since.

In fact, Zawaski, now the executive producer of the “Bernstein & McKnight” midday show, has created a mini empire of Hawks content. He can be heard on two podcasts: the “Madhouse Chicago Hockey Podcast” with James Neveau of NBC 5 and the “Locked On Blackhawks Podcast” he does solo. He also has a book due out in the spring: “The Big 50: The Men and Moments that Made the Chicago Blackhawks” from Triumph Books.

If his radio work put him on the map in the hockey media world, the “Madhouse” podcast allowed him to go places he never dreamed possible. What began in 2015 as a casual venture between two Hawks fans has turned into a small business, with downloads surpassing 50,000 this month alone.

“I still have trouble believing it sometimes,” Zawaski said.

The goal of the podcast is to fill the void left by sports-talk radio, which doesn’t give the Hawks nearly the coverage it gives the other major teams in town. Imagine Bears talk but about the Hawks for 45 minutes to an hour, generally once or twice a week. And listeners are treated to a sports-talk type of show, conversational in style and professional in sound.

“I have to give Jay the credit. He’s got the audio, technical wizardry,” said Neveau, NBC 5’s sports digital content producer. “You can tell when something is shabbily put together. We make it a point to try to make the product as polished as possible without losing that authenticity as fans.”

The success of the “Madhouse” podcast led to the “Locked On” network of podcasts reaching out to Zawaski before this season. “Locked On” has a podcast for almost every MLB, NBA and NFL team, and it’s expanding its NHL coverage. The difference is, episodes drop every weekday, which could make for quite a grind. But Zawaski has enjoyed the new endeavor.

“It’s been rewarding,” said Zawaski, who turned part of his basement in his Homewood home into a studio. “The support that I’ve gotten there from the ‘Madhouse’ listeners … I think after the first week I actually got choked up on the podcast talking about it because thousands of people came right away, and it was something I didn’t expect.”

But maybe it should be expected from a fan base that for the most part has been deprived of regular in-depth coverage over the airwaves. Stations might argue that when the conversation turns to hockey, listeners turn the channel. Zawaski argues otherwise.

“I think one thing that sports radio has failed to pick up on is those kids that were 8 or 9 when the Blackhawks started getting good are now 18 and 19, and to a lot of them, the Hawks are their No. 1 team,” he said. “We’re constantly trying to find ways to get younger and appeal to more people. Well, how about not ignoring this new fan base? I think the success of the ‘Madhouse’ podcast is proof positive that there is an audience for this.”