Retiree News

Podcasting has revolutionized the way people consume media and follow the topics they care about.

According to major music and podcast platform Spotify, there are more than 3.2 million podcasts to choose from on this platform alone. One of those podcasts is independently produced by Rohn Brown, who started “Catching Up With Lancers of the Past” (“Lancers Past” for short) in May 2020, just a few months after retiring from the Virginia Retirement System as an employer representative.

An alumnus of Longwood University in Farmville—at the time Longwood College—Brown has remained a major Longwood athletics fan since working in their sports information office as a student in the early 1980s.

“I felt it was important to go back and talk to former athletes and coaches who had been at Longwood, to talk about what it was like when they were there and what they’re doing now,” Brown says. “There are interesting stories to be told not just from their playing days but also what they’ve been doing since.”

Brown handles every aspect of production, including finding and scheduling guests, conducting interviews, post-production edits and sending the final mp3 file of each episode to a distributor for Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other platforms. He uploads two new episodes a month, typically on a schedule of every second and fourth Wednesday.

“I consider it to be a professional production,” Brown says. “If it’s not good, I don’t do it. I try to do it first class.”

Brown says starting an interview podcast in the early days of COVID-19 had its challenges.

Originally envisioning face-to-face interviews, Brown adapted and learned how to record phone interviews through a mixer for optimal sound quality. Through phone and Zoom interviews, Brown has been able to reach people who otherwise would be too far away to interview, including former Lancers in Bermuda and Cyprus.

“Some people are amazed I’m even calling them,” Brown says. “It’s a great way to reconnect with people who otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to. I’m interested in not just the athletic part but the human-interest story.”

Around the same time Brown started “Lancers Past,” he also began work on another passion project related to his love for Longwood athletics—putting together a book on Longwood’s most famous athlete, the late basketball star Jerome Kersey. Brown and Kersey attended Longwood at the same time.

The book was started years prior by Longwood sports information director Hoke Currie, but Brown inherited the project and worked to find an author and publisher for the final product, “Jerome Kersey: Overcoming the Odds.”

“It’s really not a basketball story,” Brown says. “It’s more about someone who was given opportunities and worked really hard to make the most of them. Nobody at the time knew he would have a 17-year career at the highest level of basketball in the world.”

Helping people tell their stories through his podcast while also working part-time has kept Brown focused. He says he doesn’t feel like he’s “in retirement,” just in a different phase of an unfolding life.

“Rohn Brown is not retired in any sense of the imagination,” he says. “I’m just doing something different.”

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