After ‘SportsCenter’ moment, 1st Amendment Sports looks ahead to WCAC hoops season

On the Sunday night before Thanksgiving, Ken Meringolo was sitting at the bar at Tommy Joe’s restaurant in Bethesda when ESPN’s “SportsCenter” started counting down the top 10 plays of the day. A couple of hours earlier, Meringolo had witnessed a candidate for the No. 1 spot.

Meringolo was part of the broadcast team that called the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference’s football championship at Catholic University. His company, 1st Amendment Sports, had the exclusive streaming rights for the game, which featured three lead changes in the final 29 seconds, including a Hail Mary catch in the end zone by Gonzaga’s John Marshall with no time left to beat DeMatha. The improbable ending to an instant classic earned top billing on “SportsCenter” — on an NFL Sunday, no less.

“I was standing on my chair, screaming, going freaking berserk,” Meringolo said of his reaction when the highlight appeared on the screen, along with a video credit identifying its source. “I did not have any expectation that it would be No. 1, but we all knew it was No. 1. Then Scott Van Pelt used it as his lead-in for his show right after that, which was amazing.”

It was pretty good exposure for a company that had just broadcast its third game.

[Gonzaga wins a wild WCAC championship on last-second Hail Mary]

Meringolo, whose full-time job is in energy management, founded1stAmendmentSports.com in 2008 as a labor of love. It was a digital outlet for the 1994 Bishop McNamara graduate to write and talk about D.C. sports, including the WCAC, with his friends. Meringolo also has blogged about the Redskins for the team’s SB Nation site, Hogs Haven, since 2009. Every Tuesday for the past three years, he has produced a D.C. sports-focused podcast from the basement of his Kensington, Md., home with fellow WCAC graduates from the same year Tim Strachan (DeMatha) and Kevin Ricca (St. John’s). Strachan, a star quarterback in high school, called Maryland football games with Johnny Holliday for 22 years before stepping away from the radio booth before this season.

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