D-Lo back on radio: Sacramento ESPN station launching talk show with Damien Barling
Sacramento’s ESPN Radio affiliate has announced a new sports program hosted by a pair of notable locals, launching Monday.
“D-Lo & KC” — that’s hosts Damien Barling and Kenny Caraway — will air weekdays from noon to 2 p.m. on ESPN 1320 beginning next week, the station announced Wednesday, replacing syndicated national content with local sports talk radio for that time slot.
The show will mark the return to local radio for Barling, a Sacramento native who hosted The Lo-Down on KHTK 1140 from 2016 until the station dropped it in May 2019. He’ll team up with Caraway, who has co-hosted the recently concluded Throne Room Breakdown podcast with Kings beat writer Jason Jones of The Athletic.
Barling said he and Caraway ran a test show early Friday afternoon, “trying to get a feel for this whole broadcast-from-home thing,” and that it went smoothly.
Prior to D-Lo & KC coming together, the duo knew each other mostly through social media and the occasional crossing of paths at Kings games, Barling said. They’ve gotten to know each other better over the past few months.
Barling’s excited to be part of what he called a “revamped” ESPN 1320 lineup.
“It’s gonna be a whole new sound for ESPN 1320 in Sacramento,” he told The Sacramento Bee by phone.
Caraway, also a Sacramento native and a basketball standout for C.K. McClatchy High School and Cosumnes River College, has a long career in broadcasting from FM sports radio to podcasts, according to his ESPN 1320 bio.
The show description for D-Lo & KC on the ESPN 1320 website is made up of just the two broadcasters’ bios.
Barling, 39, told The Bee’s Marcos Bretón in a column this June that the goal with The Lo-Down, which aired noon to 3 p.m., was to attract a younger audience.
His perspectives, especially those relating to former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest, left a “vocal part of the audience, a more conservative part of the audience that was older ... not pleased,” he told Bretón.
A day after President Donald Trump in September 2017 told a crowd in Alabama that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who “disrespect” the flag (“Get that son of a b--- off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired,” Trump said), Barling tweeted a photo showing Kaepernick and former teammate Eric Reid kneeling during the anthem, captioning it: “I roll with these sons of b------.”
Barling said the tweet cost his former show two advertisements, one with a gym and one with a liquor company, that “didn’t want to be associated with anyone controversial.”
Early this June, as protests against police violence were rising nationwide in response to the Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Barling tweeted screenshots showing racist texts and phone calls sent to The Lo-Down during his time hosting it.
“This is what it was like to recognize injustice, police brutality, and understand the message Kaepernick was sending 4 years ago at KHTK,” he tweeted. “... This is what we dealt with. We don’t need reflection. We knew then, and we know now where we stand.”
Earlier this year, Barling founded Be Heard, a podcast platform that focuses on Black and female content creators. Barling says Entercom, which owns ESPN 1320, is “really supportive of that Be Heard project.”
“That’s really important to me,” he said.
Barling admits he’s nervous — before every show, but especially getting back into the game after spending more than a year away from live radio hosting.
“As I sat down to do this (test show), I’m like ‘This is not the same. This is not even close to the same’” as podcasting, he said.
D-Lo & KC will feature insights on the wider sports world from the perspective of the two Sacramento natives, but of course, it’ll have plenty of local takes, too.
“We know how much Kings fans love their Kings.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 10:16 AM.
