KPTR.com - Panthers on the Net

Centralia, Illinois. The year 2000. The Centralia Holiday Tournament, a 16-team boys basketball tournament in the quaint basketball hotbed in southern Illinois. Mike Cooper, Ken Opperman, Eric Opperman, and Matt Cooper talked at McDonald's about how they wished they could broadcast Bartlett basketball like numerous small town radio stations, including Centralia's WRXX, do for their high schools. And so the dream began.

It was a dream that would take two full years to come true, and beginning in 2002, KPTR.com became a reality, as Mike, Ken, and Matt broadcast the first Bartlett Panther basketball game of the 2002-03 season at Harding Academy in Memphis. A week later, Eric joined them for the Rumble on the Ridge in Forrest City, Arkansas, and the KPTR.com "Skybox Crew" was on its way to broadcast its first year of Panther athletics.

KPTR.com has covered nearly all of Bartlett's football, boys basketball, and girls basketball games since that first broadcast at Harding Academy, and we have covered numerous other events as well, including several Panther baseball games and a competition including Bartlett's award-winning Winter Guard team. In the fall of 2003, we began WVWT — the Webcast Voice of West Tennessee — to cover various other high school and even college athletics, and we broadcast 11 games involving 11 boys basketball teams from three states at the 2003 Centralia Holiday Tournament via KPTR and WVWT.

We would like to thank you for visiting us, and we hope you enjoy our broadcasts.

We would like to thank our sponsors. Without their support, KPTR.com would be impossible.

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***KPTR.com is not an affiliate of Bartlett High School or the Shelby County school system. Opinions, play-by-play, and other comments are only the views of the broadcasters.