A Long-Distance Gonzaga Connection

When former Gonzaga basketball player Anton Watson (’24) was drafted by the Boston Celtics last summer, all of Zag Nation cheered as our team’s homegrown “glue guy” landed somewhat unexpectedly with the current NBA champions.

Among them was Spencer Martin (’18), a Vancouver, Washington, native who’d parlayed his GU degrees in broadcasting and sports administration into a burgeoning career as sports director of a TV station in Billings, Montana.

Watson was signed to a two-way contract, which means he splits time between the Boston club and its G-League affiliate the Maine Celtics (think of it as a minor-league team, or the JV squad to the varsity playing in Beantown). While Watson spent training camp and the preseason with the big squad, he’s put in most of his work this season in Portland, Maine.

Martin doesn’t have to follow Watson’s progress from afar. Shortly after Watson headed east last summer, Martin did the same when his wife Kaleigh landed a job as a nurse practitioner back in her hometown — also home to the Maine Celtics. And while Martin poked around for TV jobs, what he found instead was an opportunity to combine his skills as an experienced broadcaster with his sport management background for none other than those same Maine Celtics.

“As a lot of sport management people will attest to, when you’re in the minor leagues, you’re wearing so many different hats,” Martin says. “I do press release writing. I do game-operation setup. I help with statistics, player interviews and I run our website. You go on MaineCeltics.com, everything on there is written by me, the feature stories. I help manage our YouTube, our social media. This job blends my two backgrounds at Gonzaga perfectly.”

While he just started with the team in October, Martin’s role has already expanded to include doing the broadcast play-by-play calls for various streaming and broadcast outlets including NBC Sports Boston. He has a prime seat to watch Watson crashing the boards and working on his NBA-distance three-point shooting. When they first met, Watson was “shocked when I said I went to Gonzaga,” Martin says, and they both had a laugh as the arena announcer mispronounced the school’s name opening night, something Martin was able to correct.

“We talk Zags, we talk about all the big games,” Martin says of his interactions with Watson. “We joke about whether we’re going to stay up to 11 or not that night. Saint Mary’s was an 11 o’clock [Eastern Standard Time] tip. We joke about how late the games are, and we were just talking the other day, comparing Spokane and Maine and some of the similarities between the cities.”

Martin recently wrote a story about Watson for the team website, introducing him to the team’s considerable fan base and explaining that for the rookie ballplayer, living in the Northeast is a massive change from playing college ball in his hometown.

The move to Maine is a big change for Martin, too, after four years at Gonzaga and six years in Montana. He didn’t expect to spend so long in Billings, but the combination of job promotions, the pandemic squeezing the larger job markets and falling in love with his wife as she worked for Indian Health Services kept him in the Inland Northwest. And Martin doesn’t regret that a bit.

“I loved my time in Montana, it shaped me a lot as a person, and I saw my Gonzaga roots come out there in terms of what I cared about most and what I covered, kind of bringing that global citizen aspect to my sports journalism,” Martin says.

“My professors always said to use my gifts to impact somebody. I just won a regional Murrow Award for my work in Billings, and I got really involved with the Native American community there. My wife worked on the Crow Reservation, so we both had some roots there. Those sports stories weren’t being told as prominently as they should have been, specifically with basketball. Basketball is a lifestyle there, it’s almost a religion at times. So, the most impactful stories, the most special stories to me, were typically around the Crow Reservation.”

Spencer and Kaleigh packed up three dogs adopted from the reservation for their move to Maine, and he’s getting used to working for a team and telling stories in a different way than when he worked in media. He knows the players differently now. “It’s more personal, more attached, and I like that aspect of it,” Martin says.

And the experience he’s having with the Maine Celtics harkens back to his days in the Kennel. The team has been in town 15 years and plays in a continuously sold-out arena in front of 2,000 people each game, “so it has that Spokane, McCarthey [Athletic Center] vibe.”

Martin credits his Gonzaga education in both broadcasting and sport administration for making him flexible enough to do public relations for the team all day, then hop in the booth to call the games at night. He’s not sure where his path will lead next, but for now, he’s content showcasing his skills with the Maine Celtics, much like his fellow Zag Watson.

“I am always open to opportunities and where they may take me,” Martin says. “Coming here, I just want to do something I find fulfilling and where I can provide something as a storyteller, to the team or the people I serve. I think Gonzaga does a very good job at creating storytellers and fostering that ability to tell compelling stories.

“That said, I’ve always had a bit of a dream to work in the NBA, so for me to be able to move to Maine and find this club that just happens to be a part of the Boston Celtics, and a stone’s throw away from the NBA, it felt like the right fit at the right time. We’ll see what happens.”