Announcer Stevens' interest in broadcasting began at an early age

Delta Downs announcer Don Stevens grew up in several states because of his father’s position with the Federal Aviation Administration. The most influential of them all might have been Washington.

Stevens has long been a diehard fan of the Seattle Seahawks. But the connection goes much deeper.

“Longacres is where I was introduced to racing,” said Stevens, a 55-year-old native of Kansas. “It was a beautiful old track. It was 1977, the first year I ever went to a race in person. I was 13. My mom took me out there. My dad worked a lot and my mom and I went and did things together. We went to the Longacres Mile.”

It ended up being nearly two decades before Stevens would pursue a career in racing. He earned a degree in commercial art from the Art Instruction School in Minneapolis, Minn., and later worked a weekend disc jockey at WKY in Oklahoma City.

“It’s the oldest radio station west of the Mississippi,” said Stevens. “When I was a kid, I was always interesting in being a broadcaster. I would always take a little take a little tape recorder and act like I was calling the big game.”

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Stevens was in his early 30s when he went to a broadcasting camp affiliated with the University of Oklahoma. It was there he met the announcer from Remington Park.

“Jim Byers was a guest one day and I struck up a conversation with him,” Stevens said. “I’d been a racing fan since I was a kid. He had me come out to the track and that’s where it started.”

Stevens in 1996 became the backup announcer at Remington and took over as full-time announcer in 1999 when Byers, now the announcer at Lone Star Park, began calling baseball and hockey. Stevens was brought on as the announcer and racing media relations manager at Delta in November 2003.

“Delta had just been bought by Boyd Gaming and they started the Delta Downs Jackpot the year before, as a $500,000 race,” Stevens said. “The year I came it went to $1 million. Three weeks after I got here, I got to call the first $1 million Jackpot.”

Stevens has since helped shape the Delta experience for many as he appears on camera each race to give out selections in light-hearted, engaging programming. He said the best feedback he gets is when patrons say it’s “like me and a buddy, just at the track as friends.”

“What I try to do is make it fun and do music,” Stevens said. “We want to make it an entertaining evening. But I do take my handicapping very seriously. We try to make the presentation fun.”

Stevens also is making racing fans through a YouTube channel he launched on his own, profiling horsemen at Delta. The videos he’s posted have had 375,000 views since 2016.

“I started using an iPhone and said, ‘I need to get a camera to do a little better.’ Then I said, ‘I need to learn to edit this stuff.’ ” Stevens said. “One thing led to another, and I’ve got four or five cameras, GoPros, a much better laptop. I kind of went overboard. You can ask my wife. I bought at lot of equipment!”

The enthusiasm Stevens brings to his role with Delta, which closes its meet Saturday night, can be traced to that first experience he had at Longacres.

“I do it for the fans,” he said.