George Vogel

When George Vogel graduated from Georgetown, Ohio, High School in 1975, he wasn’t sure what career he wanted to pursue.

He enrolled at Southern State Community College for two years while driving a truck making freight deliveries for a Georgetown company

Everything clicked in 1979 when he transferred to the University of Cincinnati and enrolled in the Electronic Media Department within the College-Conservatory of Music.

Vogel loved it from the get-go. He took broadcast journalism and writing courses to learn everything he could about the industry. That paid off with an internship at WLWT-TV working with Sports Director Zip Rzeppa. The one-term internship led to independent study and four quarters of on-the-job learning.

While still a student, he was hired part-time at WLWT-TV to work with his UC newswriting teacher Tony Mastriani writing copy for cut-ins and the Mid-Day news.

Armed with a UC degree in 1981, Vogel became a full-time WLWT-TV employee in 1982, but it wasn’t in sports. He worked the assignment desk for nearly three years. When the station  expanded its high school sports coverage in 1987, he moved to on-air sports reporting.

From then on, it was all anchoring and reporting on some of the biggest stories in Cincinnati sports history. He was in the right place at the right time. When the Bengals went to the Super Bowl in Miami in 1989, Vogel was there. When the Reds went wire-to-wire and won the 1990 World Series, Vogel was part of the coverage.

It was the same in 1992 when UC went to the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament in Minneapolis. News anchor Jerry Springer was part of the team coverage as well.

Beyond that, there were countless high school sports championships to cover, college sports including UC playing for a national championship and much more.  

Vogel retired at the end of 2023.