Dave Sims - Biography

Biography

Dave Sims grew up in Philadelphia and attended Bethany College in West Virginia, where he played catcher and majored in mass communications. He began his career as a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. In radio, Sims became the host of WNBC's SportsNight in the mid-1980s (replacing Jack Spector), a five-hour nightly sports call-in show that was a precursor to the all-sports talk format of WFAN. He went on to cohost the midday show with Ed Coleman on New York's Sports Radio 66 WFAN on in the early 1990s, the show being nicknamed "Coleman and the Soul Man". He then became a weekend sports anchor at WCBS-TV in New York.

In 1991, Sims joined ESPN as a play-by-play announcer for college basketball, and added college football in 1998. He primarily called Big East contests on the ESPN Plus regional network.

Prior to taking the permanent play-by-play position on Sunday Night Football, Sims was the #2 broadcaster for Westwood One's Sunday afternoon NFL doubleheader. He replaced Joel Meyers on the Sunday Night Football game in 2006.

In addition to Sunday Night Football, Sims also calls college basketball for Westwood One, with his most notable call to date being the George Mason-UConn regional final in 2006 (where #11 seed George Mason upset top-seed Connecticut to become the second #11 seed in history to reach the Final Four).

While working in other sports, he occasionally provided Major League Baseball play-by-play for ESPN and did an internet radio show for MLB.com. In 2007, he took the opportunity to return to baseball full-time as part of the Seattle Mariners television broadcast. One of the few African-American broadcasters in the sport, he is also perhaps the only one of that group not to have played in the major leagues.

Sims was the broadcaster on the FOX television network on April 21, 2012, describing Philip Humber's perfect game. However, the game was broadcast in its entirety only in the Chicago and Seattle markets, because the rest of the country heard Joe Buck and Tim McCarver call a game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

Just four months after calling Philip Humber's perfect game, Félix Hernández threw the first perfect game in Mariners' history. Sims called the game for Root Sports in Seattle. This is the first time that one broadcaster has called two perfect games in the same Major League Baseball season. He is not the first broadcaster to call two perfect games, though, as Vin Scully has called four in his career.