Christiansburg native plants his flag in a growing sport

Virginia Tech alumnus Kyle Bailey has built a successful career as the host of a radio sports show in Charlotte and recently broadcast USA Football’s top international event for flag football – a low-contact sport rapidly gaining in popularity and set to debut in the Olympics in 2028.

It may come as a surprise to many that the host of Charlotte’s top-rated afternoon sports radio show actually got his master’s degree in geography and geographic information science.

But Bailey ’09, ’14, M.S. ’15 knew better than to leave anything to chance given the uncertainty in the world of sports journalism.

“That was my backup plan,” Bailey said of his degree in geography. “If this whole broadcasting thing didn’t work out, I wanted to have something a little bit more solid to fall back on.”

This three-time Virginia Tech graduate and Christiansburg native certainly has mapped out a successful career for himself thus far. He not only hosts his own sports radio show in the Queen City – “The Kyle Bailey Show” airs weekdays from 3-6 p.m. – but he also hosts the pregame shows for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers and NBA’s Charlotte Hornets and various other specialty programming, such as NFL Draft and PGA Tour specials.

More recently, Bailey dove into the streaming realm, broadcasting a sport rapidly gaining worldwide popularity and attention.

Bailey was chosen to be the play-by-play voice for USA Football’s top international flag football event. Working for HomeTeam Live, a company that specializes in broadcast-quality streaming of amateur sports, the Christiansburg native spent a week in Los Angeles in mid-July broadcasting USA Football’s “Week at The One,” a series of elite flag football competitions held at Dignity Health Sports Park, home of the five-time Major League Soccer Cup winners LA Galaxy.

Bailey had connections with USA Football, and organizers reached out to him to gauge his interest in helping them revamp the broadcasting of the event. A few months ago, they offered him a contract.

“I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ It all happened quickly,” Bailey said. “I’ve been primarily a radio host, a talk show host, for the last several years, but I’d done enough play-by-play that I had some stuff to pass along. It’s really where my passion is, and so they heard it, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds great. Let’s do it.’”

Wes Bryant, a former football player at Wake Forest, served as the color analyst. The event featured the Junior International Cup in which boys and girls ages 15 and under and ages 17 and under competed against teams from Canada, Japan, Mexico, and Panama. It also featured the Select Bowl in which various select teams composed of athletes trying to make the U.S. National Team competed. The week then concluded with The One Flag Championship in which invited club teams consisting of both youth and adults from across more than 10 divisions competed for a national championship.

“I loved every bit of it. It was awesome,” Bailey said. “I could never live in Southern California, but that was a wonderful event. It was first class, top to bottom.

“We [he and Bryant] went into it thinking, ‘OK, these kids are playing for something significant. Let’s give them a significant sounding broadcast.’ And that’s what we did, and the parents were thrilled with it. The CEO came up to us on the second day and was raving about how much everybody seemed to love what we were doing. So we were proud of the work we did, for sure.”

The opportunity offered Bailey a chance to promote a sport gaining in popularity. According to the International Federation of American Football, which governs the sport globally, 20 million people are playing flag football across more than 100 countries. Last fall, the International Olympic Committee approved the addition of flag football as an Olympic sport starting with the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

In addition, according to USA Football, the number of boys and girls ages 6-17 playing the sport increased 38 percent from 2014-23, reaching a peak of more than 1.6 million this past year.

Much of that growth is being driven by women. Eleven U.S. states sanction high school girls’ varsity flag football with several others exploring the possibility through pilot programs. Also, 25 colleges at the NAIA level sponsor women’s flag football.

Of note, Jada Vick, the daughter of former Virginia Tech football and NFL superstar Michael Vick, received a scholarship to play flag football at Reinhardt University, 60 miles north of Atlanta. She will be a sophomore this fall.

“For boys, flag’s still big for them, but they’re always going to treat flag football like a summer sport, and that’s OK,” Bailey said. “But for the women, there’s no tackle football infrastructure for women, and honestly a lot of women don’t want to play tackle football. Some do, but a lot of them don’t, so flag football offers them an incredible opportunity.

“The U.S. national team is incredible. I’ve got two daughters and a son, and I would love for my girls to participate in this. I think it would be amazing.”

Bailey hopes to be asked to broadcast The Flag Football World Championships held in Lahti, Finland, in late August, though it again would mean being away from his three children – all under the age of 4 – and wife, Camille ’16, a Virginia Tech alumna whom Bailey met in 2014 during his second year of graduate school while giving her and her father a campus tour.

But the event would be another achievement in a career that kicked off at Clear Channel — now iHeart — in Richmond after graduation before he returned to the New River Valley and launched an afternoon radio sports show that became popular in Southwest Virginia. While doing that, he finished a second undergraduate degree in geospatial and environmental analysis from the College of Natural Resources and Environment to go with his communications degree from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and he earned his master’s degree in geography.

Bailey left Blacksburg in 2016 to host a morning sports show in Charleston, South Carolina, and do play-by-play for The Citadel men’s basketball games – a job that led to a move to Charlotte, one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation and one with a growing sports scene.

“Kyle is an example of a broadcaster from Virginia Tech who has worked hard to refine his craft and make a name for himself in a big market,” said Bill Roth, the radio play-by-play voice for Virginia Tech football and someone who oversees the sports media and analytics program within the School of Communication at the university. “It’s exciting to drive along Interstate 77, turn on WFNZ and say, ‘Hey, that’s a Hokie hosting one of Charlotte’s top sports radio shows.’”

With a long-term contract and a thriving sports show in a city looking to be one of the best sports destinations in the Southeast, Bailey won’t need his backup plan any time soon.

“I can accomplish everything that I want to accomplish in radio right here in Charlotte,” he said. “I don’t need to go anywhere.  

“This is one of the few cities where the cranes never get put away. There are always new high rises, new buildings, new apartments. All the banks are here, and businesses are moving here. This city, even though the NFL and the NBA teams are bad, has committed to being a sports city. I think it’s only a matter of time before we get a Major League Baseball team in Charlotte, and they just tried to steal the Western and Southern Open [a prominent tennis tournament] from Cincinnati.

“They’re doubling and tripling down on getting as many sporting events here in Charlotte as possible, so I’ve got no reason to go anywhere else.”

Jimmy Robertson, Virginia Tech