Dan Lucy let go from OzarksFirst sports director job

OzarksFirst Sports Director Dan Lucy, a fixture at Springfield’s CBS TV affiliate KOLR since 1988, confirmed to Springfield Business Journal that station management declined to renew his contract and he has exited the station.

Lucy’s last day working with OzarksFirst’s KOLR, KOZL and KRBK was June 2, he said.

“The television station elected not to renew the contract and said that they were changing the way that they were doing sports, and that they had no need of a sports director anymore,” Lucy said in a June 8 interview with SBJ.

Lucy said he did not want to have an on-air farewell segment broadcast, as the decision to leave was not his.

He added that his contract with OzarksFirst, which is part of Texas-based Nexstar Media Group Inc., was up roughly a year ago, and he worked one year without a contract. He asked for another contract since then “and was told what I was told,” he said.

Lucy said he believes OzarksFirst continues to employ one or two sports journalists. The company’s website on June 8 showed one reporter on the sports beat. SBJ has reached out to OzarksFirst’s station manager and news director for confirmation on its current sports staff.

Lucy said he’s currently taking a break but may be back in the fall for Missouri State University-related broadcasting.

A graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia journalism school, Lucy started his career at KOMU in Columbia. He said he arrived in Springfield in December 1988 to work at KOLR as a weekend sports anchor and reporter.

“It’s been 37 1/2 years that I’ve been at KOLR 10,” Lucy said. “I arrived in December of ’88 when Charlie Spoonhour was the [Missouri State] basketball coach. So that’ll tell you how long ago it was.”

In spring of 1993, KOLR’s then-sports director Scott Opfer left the station to start a marketing business, and Lucy was named sports director.

In 2018, Lucy’s sports broadcasting career was honored by his induction into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.

Lucy said it’s been an “honor and a privilege” to be a sports storyteller for the Ozarks community.

“We got to cover the (Missouri State) men going to the 1999 Sweet 16; the whole Jackie Stiles hoopla with her breaking the NCAA record and then going to the Final Four,” he said. “I was in Atlanta with the Drury Panthers when they won the national championship in 2013.”

He said the biggest challenge was the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was required to work from home for roughly six weeks. He counted it a point of pride that despite pandemic shutdowns that cancelled myriad sporting events, his team was able to get sports news on the air most days. Lucy added that at that time, no one from the station’s sports department, which had three employees at that time, was subject to a job layoff.