Today we’d like to introduce you to The Far End of The Bench Podcast.
Hello The Far End of The Bench Podcast, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Myself (Jimmy Pallotto) and my co-host Niko Bryant first met back in middle school when despite over an hour drive to and from practice, we played on the same youth football team. This was when we were in 6th grade and initially, we were both weary of the other, at that point he and I were the two biggest kids on the team so we were rivals in most drills and through that competition a bond formed. We played the final three years of youth football before high school together and at that time we began discussing a business model that set the framework of the podcast that we have now today.
Niko knew he wanted to study business and be involved in sports that way after college, and when I realized I didn’t have the size I needed to play in the NFL I decided the next best thing would be to get a job to watch and talk about sports, I was to study broadcasting. Then when we graduate, we can combine our powers and have a sports agency where he represents athletes, and I broadcast and spread the story of those athletes. Niko and I have always been able to talk for hours about sports with the combined love of football and then filling the gaps in the other sports, Niko loving the Nuggets and basketball since before he could walk, and myself having a younger brother who sat in the Stanley Cup after the last time the Avs won in the NHL. We made our pact to go into business together in high school after I came back to Cherry Creek, where we played and graduated from in 2016, then left to college to gain our end of the bargain in knowledge.
Niko played a season of football at Augustana College in Illinois before he transferred to GCU in Phoenix where he played club lacrosse and was a major part of the Business Club on campus. I stayed in Colorado and went west to live in the middle of the mountains and play football in Gunnison, Colorado for the Western Colorado University Mountaineers. I played on the team from 2016-2019, during that time I was hired as both an RA on campus, and by happenstance at a party hired as the Sports Director for the student-run station on campus, KWSB 91.1fm “The Penguin”. Around the time I was getting ready to graduate before the pandemic shut everything down, I needed to figure out how I could continue to practice my broadcasting skills now that I wouldn’t have the talk radio show I hosted, or the ability to live commentate games. I put most of the money I had toward an Adobe Audition subscription and put a $1,000 Mac book laptop on a credit card to launch my first attempt at a podcast, my solo show “The Center of Attention”. It failed after about 40 episodes, but Niko and I had a couple of episodes where he was my guest and we got back in the habit of discussing sports for hours.
When I knew “Center of Attention” needed to end I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to keep any kind of show running, at least not by myself. So, I reached out to the world on Twitter for serious inquiries to be my co-host, I had bought Zoom Pro so if need be and someone out of the state of Colorado agreed to come on we could make that work. This was the height of the pandemic when shelter in place was still strictly enforced, then when it lifted, I had a graduation party to celebrate and Niko was invited with his family. Sitting in my garage he asked if I was still looking for someone to do a podcast with, I had received zero responses so I tried to play it cool. We talked it out, remembered our pact, and set a date to meet at his apartment to brainstorm what our show would be. The names we started with were things like “The Stallion and the Bus” to play off the “Fighter and the Kid” style of name and nothing seemed to click, our nicknames have nothing to do with each other, then we thought about who we would represent on the show. We are both former hyper-competitive athletes who now need to watch and bet on sports just to get something close to the feeling of playing, we were the high school studs clamoring from the far end of the bench in our rec league games, hence the name of the show.
Our original plan came together, Niko worked with his dad to get us an LLC for the show and a trademark on the name, we own “The Far End of The Bench”, I had the knowledge and experience editing the show and putting it together in a way we wanted. The first few episodes SUCKED. I wish we could get rid of episodes 1-6, other than keeping the tradition of our show’s segments we were super nervous and robotic, it took Niko’s dad telling us to our faces after recording a full 90-minute show how bad we sucked. “If you guys are gonna do this and have it fail, shouldn’t you have fun doing it?”. No better way to put it I guess, but it helped. Over time we developed our shows’ voice, we felt comfortable being ourselves and remembering that the people listening were like us and had fan alliances. Then we got the interviews started with Chris “Birdman” Andersen after episode 11, then Super Bowl Champion Louis Vasquez, while we worked to grow our community across social media, our content improved.
We joined a network with other small podcasters around the country that played recorded episodes in a radio-style format on a website, we spent about a year there and that helped get our name in front of more people around the country and made us better as we competed for the highest ratings each week, which we achieved in the time we were there. Now we find ourselves in the midst of another wave of content, in the time we started we had both bubble championships, two Super Bowls, two World Series, Summer and Winter Olympics, and two sets of NCAA Football and March madness tournaments. We have been a podcast for a year and a half, so we are still finding ways to incorporate more of our personality, while covering all the news we would want if we were just listening to the show. We just paid for our first set of professional logos, we have a up and coming Country Music star in Nashville, Warren Garret, writing and recording an original theme song that will be released soon, and have been a part of two separate ad campaigns that paid us over $1,000 with a sportsbook. This is a hobby that is a passion project for the two of us that we love putting in hours of work and slowly building up. Because at some point we are going to be seeing how far we can push this while continuing to bring fun and entertaining sports content to the world
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Nothing worth doing goes smoothly, and this is such a trial-and-error field you almost need to butt heads to work out the best ideas for shows. Niko and I also have a relationship similar to that of brothers more than friends. I love my brother and he loves me, but sometimes you just want to hit that guy to knock some sense into them. Through it all there have been periods of time where we had to just take a week to cool off, but there’s never a time where either of us have been mad enough that pushing the show hasn’t been a priority. The respect that we have for each other’s work ethic helps us get through times where we maybe had a disagreement about something, Niko just took a month and a half away from the show so he could get a bulk of his day job work done, and in that time, I was rolling the show solo. Even though it shifted a new workload onto me, I respected Niko for knowing he wouldn’t have time to give the show the attention it deserved, and he trusted me to keep thing going while he was away. Now we are both back and we are discussing things that no doubt will cause us to butt heads, but those times are when we have grown the show and our fan base the most.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
In our bio we make sure to have “Denver-Based” in the first couple of phrases, we both love sports outside of just the teams in Colorado, and I’m even a Cincinnati Bengals fan, but being from Colorado is a huge part of both of us. So, we cover sports from an angle that focuses on the information we would have both liked to get living in a sports market like Colorado that is viewed as mid-sized. We have teams in all four major sports leagues, but still, since we are in the western part of the country that isn’t quite LA we get forgotten. So, our show is about all major sports but told in our specific way from our perspective.
As far as other skills the both of us posses, Niko is really good at social media. I try and get better and I have improved, but any tweet we have go viral mainly comes from Niko getting something out at the right time. The Jokic MVP is an example I can think of (https://twitter.com/FeOTBpod/status/1402386045661024260?s=20&t=F9fsM9LKaYi_C3lWVr6Vcg), that was the first tweet from our account that got 50,000+ impressions and he’s been getting more and more consistent with hits like that.
For myself my biggest strength is my experience in broadcasting during college. I was able to learn a ton of how to edit together and structure a show as the sports director, and I hosted a bi-weekly sports talk show for two years, now I also used different tricks I picked up in communications classes to have the best quality sounding show. I also have been goring in my video editing skills and some of the best videos on our channel I actually filmed the footage and edited together myself. Our men’s rec league basketball highlights and our golfing highlights are two of my favorites
Men’s Rec: https://youtu.be/3afLEk-a2Bc
FeOTB Golf: https://youtu.be/SjCLnDEB0vE
What would you say has been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
As long as you keep things in perspective you can work through any rough patch. The only time bad things last is when you allow them to plague your progress. If we aren’t growing one month we have to pivot and find the new way to get our content engaged with. If we just sulk about people not liking us anymore it will ensure they continue not to like us. It really comes from our athletic careers, neither of us were the most talented especially the older we got, but he and I were always hard workers, never missed the weight rooms, and we normally would go against each other the first rep of a drill to set the tone. So, we just now work that way on making a podcast people can’t wait to listen to.
Contact Info:
- Email: thefarendofthebench@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feotbpod/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jimmy.pallotto
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/FeOTBpod
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZW9_VZLTLlkLLBHla63Jvw
- SoundCloud: https://open.spotify.com/show/6iQl62c4WQujFaiVHPzgm6?si=b223a2965ff7464e
- Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/far-end-of-the-bench-with-jimmy-pallotto-and-niko-bryant/id1493003669
Image Credits
@LogoHog
