Kristin Wells, who has long appreciated the value of history and archives, recently completed her master’s thesis on documentary media history, athletics, and race relations, chronicling and analyzing over half a century of encounters at the University of Wyoming and the University of Missouri. Now, she has become the foremost expert on what may prove to be the nation’s largest personal archive of broadcast sports media clips: the John Miley Sports Broadcasting Collection at the Media School at Indiana University.
Wells received her bachelor’s degree in media studies and Spanish from The University of Tulsa where she merged her love for storytelling and athletics – specifically, college sports – in 2020. She also spent time as a research assistant, conducting interviews and capturing footage for UTulsa’s Immigrant Rights Project, before joining the news team at a local television station and serving as a communications fellow with the Oklahoma Policy Institute.
Wells went on to earn her master’s degree in media arts and sciences at Indiana University where she is now a doctoral student. That’s where she first heard about the Miley archive. “I think when I was first told about this collection, my jaw actually dropped, and then it stayed there as I was told it was coming here to the Media School,” she said.
John Miley, now 93, started recording baseball broadcasts for fun in high school on his home radio before moving to television and video cassette recorder. Soon, his friends started cutting highlights and sharing with him. The clips included baseball, football, basketball, and even some Olympic events.
In 2023, Miley donated his personal archive to IU. The archive includes more than 44,000 clips spanning almost a century of sports beginning in the early 1930s.
“This collection is simply astounding in its breadth and richness,” Wells said. “To capture this much history – not just sports history but broadcast, and thus American, history – I count myself fortunate to be able to work intricately with these materials, and with John.”
Wells works on the collection with the director of the National Sports Journalism Center at IU, Professor Galen Clavio, and Media School Archivist Joshua Bennett. She oversees an enormous spreadsheet cataloging the archive, tagging and annotating every clip. She noted how games were called differently over time and how history cannot be separated from sports pastimes. For example, one baseball game began with a 15-minute news clip about Allied efforts in World War II.
“I’ve always been fascinated by history and the ways that we come to access history today,” Wells said. “How things in the past get recorded, retold, reframed, and more is a central piece of my own curiosities and research, and I spend time in archives and with archival material. The chance to work on the backend of bringing in a collection like this is an invaluable experience. The work may appear tedious but I lose myself in the work so easily.”
Always intrigued by the intersection of sports and society, Wells took courses from UTulsa media studies associate professors Mark Brewin, who is writing a historical book on sports media protests; Emily Contois, who is writing a critical analysis book on what it means to be an athlete in contemporary culture; and Justin Rawlins, who received his doctorate from Indiana University. Also instrumental in Wells’ success was Media Studies Chair Benjamin Peters, who connected her with colleague and fellow media historian Rachel Plotnick at IU.
More information on the Miley Collection:
Preserving 70 years’ worth of sports broadcasts
Want to hear the greatest moments in sports? This Indiana man can play them for you