If you’re a soccer or basketball fan in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, you probably got a dose of Mark Followill this past weekend. If you’re a fan of both FC Dallas and the Dallas Mavericks, you probably had a moment of confusion mixed into your sports viewing Saturday evening.
FC Dallas opened their season at Toyota Stadium in Frisco at 3:30 p.m. against the New England Revolution while the Mavericks hosted the Memphis Grizzlies at the American Airlines Center in Dallas at 7:30 p.m. For a fan to merely attend both games would be quite the day. But Followill was not just present, he was on your television screen as the play-by-play voice for both games.
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“It doesn’t surprise me one bit because it’s all about preparation,” said Steve Davis, Followill’s FC Dallas broadcast partner.
That preparation began on what should have been a relaxing day for Followill. After calling the Mavericks’ win over the Pacers Wednesday night, Followill made his way to Toyota Stadium in Frisco with Davis to observe FC Dallas training and take notes on the new team. He didn’t need a crash course; in addition to his familiarity with the returning players, Followill also kept up with preseason action. He attended new FC Dallas head coach Luchi Gonzalez’ season-opening press conference on January 22nd despite being with the Mavericks in Milwaukee the night before and calling their game that same night against the Los Angeles Clippers at the AAC.
Question not our dedication! …@MFollowill and I out on a cold, cold morning, gathering up info and insight for Saturday's first @fcdallas broadcast of '19. @MLS pic.twitter.com/oO7weblz0J
— Steve Davis (@SteveDavis90) February 28, 2019
“My work wasn’t any harder for this particular FC Dallas game than it would be for any other one,” Followill said.
Scouting FC Dallas training aside, preparation for a regular FC Dallas game usually consists of about five hours of prep work, doing individual notes on the players and team trends going into the game, in this case carrying it over from last season. The research includes things like their head-to-head history with New England, how FC Dallas has played in season openers and additional nuggets that get casually brought up throughout the course of a broadcast.
Calling the two games on Saturday was just part of Followill’s busy weekend. Things got rolling on Friday with the fourth annual Mavs Ball, for which Followill served as a co-emcee with Fox Sports Southwest’s Dana Larson. Followill arrived a few hours early along with everybody else involved to go through a rehearsal and then enjoyed the event with the company of his wife. The Mavericks surpassed their goal of raising $1 million, getting the number up to $1.3 million for the Mavs Foundation. Followill was back home by 11:15 p.m. but his day wasn’t quite over yet.
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He had homework to turn in.
This wasn’t some professional homework that he needed to complete before the wild 24 hours that awaited him. Along with everything in the booth — the Mavericks, FC Dallas, 2018 FIFA World Cup, college football and more—Followill has studied at El Centro Community College for around two years. He has taken three semesters of Spanish online and is in the midst of his fourth in Spring 2019.
“I’ve lived almost all of my life in Texas, I’ve always had a little ability and knew [Spanish] on a very basic level but the culture is very intriguing and interesting to me,” Followill said. “I think anybody who follows me on social media knows that whenever there’s a chance to go on vacation, my wife and I go to Mexico a lot.
“I wanted to learn to speak the language better than just the really basic things that I could do. I wanted to do that for a long time and finally stopped making excuses for having enough time to do it and finally just said, ‘Alright, I’m going to make it work around the other things I have going on and just figure out a way to do it.’”
Followill tried to learn Spanish in different ways but concluded that the best way to go about it was through college. What comes with that, though, are research papers and presentations, both of which were due by midnight on his busy Saturday. So, when Followill got home from emceeing the Mavs Ball, he put his student cap on. His professor had assigned a topic to the class and each student had to write a reflective paper; constructing an argument, supporting it, adding a conclusion and finding sources to support the opinion, then making a work cited page according to MLA format. A PowerPoint presentation was required to accompany the paper.
Followill finished one part Friday night and went to sleep. He woke up Saturday morning and finished up the rest of his assigned work from school. Though he isn’t having fluent conversations in Spanish just yet, connecting with others was a big motivation for taking this step that has him placed in his second semester of intermediate Spanish after two semesters as a beginner.
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“All of these years being involved in FC Dallas and the other soccer that I’m doing, I’m missing an opportunity to talk to people, get to know them better, learn their stories better and share those stories better because of the communication gap and language barrier,” Followill said. “My reading and writing, where it is helping me, is especially in soccer when you’re getting ready to do a game involving Uruguay in the World Cup, for example, last summer, I can go to a newspaper and read the articles a lot better than I could in the past.
“Reading and writing has drastically improved, speaking is improved; being able to understand a native speaker is still very, very challenging but we’re only a limited amount of time in this experiment.”
After having both the paper and presentation turned in by Saturday morning, Followill was now set to focus on his job the rest of the day.
Followill rode to the FC Dallas game in the passenger seat, his wife dropping him off outside Toyota Stadium at 1:30 p.m. This was in an effort to remove the hassle of parking, conserving every minute possible. Two hours after his arrival, it was go time in Frisco. Once the game got rolling, it was just like it’s been for the better part of the past seven years.
“He’s a pro,” Davis said. “Mark makes my job so, so easy. He’s informed about the game, he knows when to give the analyst room to talk, he understands what’s going on on the field because he’s not just a professional in the broadcast business, he’s a fan of the game; certain teams, Arsenal, a big one of them.
“As far as local broadcast crews, I just think we’re really, really lucky in Dallas to have Mark Followill.”
At 3:50 p.m., 13 minutes into the match, Followill called FC Dallas’ first goal of the season, scored by Michael Barrios. New England would later score a goal of their own and the match ended in a 1-1 draw at approximately 5:30 p.m.
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Followill exited the stadium to the waiting vehicle of his good friend Kevin “Expo” Fox, who had his car ready in a position to quickly hit the road and avoid the worst of Dallas-area traffic. He arrived at the AAC at 6:25 p.m., a time that could have been shaved a little, if you ask Followill.
“Honestly, we probably could have dropped me off five minutes earlier at the American Airlines Center,” Followill said. “We tried one of those things where we tried to get me as close as I could because of the rain but we probably could have been at the arena at 6:20 p.m., quite honestly, if we had just settled for me walking a little bit farther in the drizzle.”
Still, no harm. Mavs had a special guest on the pregame show in J.J. Barea, who joined Larson, Jeff “Skin” Wade and Cedric Ceballos so Followill and Mavericks color commentator Derek Harper weren’t needed for the pregame show. Instead, Followill put on his headset at 6:30 p.m. to record a segment that gets played during the national anthem. From then, it was just another Mavericks game broadcast that had Followill’s high-energy calls sprinkled in when warranted, such as a Maxi Kleber assist to Dwight Powell for a big dunk in the second quarter.
The game got out of hand for Dallas in the second half of the 111-81 loss. Afterwards, Followill didn’t have his regular postgame responsibilities so he waited for game traffic to clear before taking an Uber home. After a day that saw him turn in homework for a college class, call a Major League Soccer game and then an NBA game, Followill couldn’t just go straight to sleep. He started packing for a six-day Mavericks road trip; the team flight would leave in about 12 hours.
Followill flew out of Dallas with the Mavericks at noon on Sunday and arrived in frigid Brooklyn a few hours later to finally cap off a busy weekend. He gets some time to relax before calling the Mavericks game against the Nets Monday night at 7:30 p.m. on Fox Sports Southwest.
Followill is undoubtedly living out his dreams but there are some challenges, such as making sure to allot time for his personal life and family. One thing that has helped in the past year is less involvement and presence on social media, part of an effort to set priorities.
“You kind of make yourself do it,” Followill said. “You just have to prioritize. I do work a lot but I do find time to disconnect from it, turn it off and focus on things that aren’t related to that, be it personal relationships or other things that I have interest in that are completely independent of my work life.”
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Sometimes that work life just serves as a reminder for Followill that his lifetime of hard work has paid off.
“I appreciate the fact I’m doing two teams in my hometown,” Followill said. “Whenever I can make it work on a day, like yesterday, I’m going to go as much as I can, as much as reasonably possible, above and beyond the call to be in position to do FC Dallas games along with the Mavs because I love doing games with both teams.”
(Photo courtesy of Mark Followill)