It was easy for him to see.

“What do you shoot?”, he asked, as I stood in for my first golf lesson.

I hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, I use to break 90 all the time.  But now I have trouble breaking 100 because I don’t play that often.”

That’s all he needed to hear. “People that can’t break 100 don’t hit the ball solidly.  Their fundamentals, like grip and stance, are out of whack.”

His diagnosis: simple and accurate.

What if that simple discernment could be applied to programming your station?

Breaking 100 is about the basics.  The correlation to programming is understanding what songs to play and what to do between songs.

If your talent don’t know what to talk about (or how to talk about it), they don’t understand the purpose of the format.  They don’t understand “why people hire them”, as Mark Ramsey would say.

If we understand that people tune to your station to be encouraged and entertained, to have their values in faith, family and community affirmed, then we have a filter by which they can choose what they talk about;

…whether at five o’clock in the afternoon on the way home from work…

…on Sunday morning on the way to church or…

…waking up and starting my day,

…which is when I actually heard a reference to “partial human remains” while eating my breakfast (I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say), an obvious sign of not understanding the format.

If you can’t break 100, you don’t understand why people listen.

On the next Frost Advisory; what if you can’t break 90?