‘Kraken Max’ Builds On-Air Rep Off Favorite Team  

Aspiring teen sports broadcaster Max Pelter never set out to gain a nickname from covering his favorite NHL team.

But his fellow Mercer Island High School students nod knowingly in the corridors as “Kraken Max” hustles on by to the campus radio station to produce his latest weekly segment on a squad now challenging for first place in the Pacific Division. KMIH 88.9 The Bridge is widely recognized as one of the nation’s top high school radio outlets and 10^th grade sophomore Pelter, 15, has been a rising star since he first began producing Kraken recaps in spring 2023 while still in middle school.

“Hockey is just my favorite sport, and when the team got announced with all the hype and stuff, I just wanted to get involved,” Pelter said. “So, I contacted the station, and I was saying, ‘There’s not really much Kraken coverage, especially here on the Island, do you think I could maybe do something about that?’

“And they said yes, so it’s just gone from there. I started during the playoff run in seventh grade, and then I’ve just kept it up since.”

Pelter’s on-air recaps typically last a minute or two, going through the ins and outs of the team’s prior seven days.

“It’s kind of an overview of who scored and my personal takeaways from that,” Pelter said. “I usually cover what happened that entire past week. A lot of times they’ll have played three or four games, so I just break down what happened.”

The station’s general manager and broadcast media instructor, Joe Bryant, a former longtime co-host of The Bob Rivers Show on KJR-FM, gave Pelter his on-air shot because he liked the drive and energy he displayed despite being younger than the high school students working alongside him. Bryant is now on sabbatical, but Natalie Woods, a longtime journalist now serving as the station’s broadcast media teacher, agreed that Pelter shows enormous talent for his age.

“Max is extraordinarily unusual because he came to us on his own as a seventh grader,” Woods said. “He knew about our program. He was interested in sports broadcasting and then obviously had an interest in the Kraken and hockey.

“We’re always open to any kind of student that wants to come in and be involved,” she added. “They don’t have to be enrolled in our classes. And so, Max started coming in on his own time every Friday at 7 a.m. to produce his Kraken reports. It didn’t take long before we started naming him ‘Kraken Max,’ and he’d be doing content for our sports updates every single week. I mean, we do a sports update daily, but then on Fridays when he was here, we’d bump that into our update and toss to ‘Kraken Max’ who’d give us what was going on with the Kraken.”

Woods said Pelter sounds “authentic and knowledgeable” and even spent time at a University of Washington sports play-by-play “boot camp” a couple of summers ago to hone his skills. She said he now plays back his reports to critique his own style and prepare himself for an eventual broadcasting career in college and then professionally.

“He has an obvious interest in sports, which is what it takes to be good behind the mic,” she said. “And he’s interested in getting better and improving.”

KMIH 88.9 The Bridge last year was named the top high school station in the country for the first time by the John Drury High School Radio Awards hosted by WONC-FM at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Last week, at this year’s version of the same awards, the school won two more categories for best website and public affairs program, and a third-place mention for best specialty music program.

Pelter is now finally the same age as some peers at the highly regarded station, and this fall began working on a longer-form, sports-related podcast that will incorporate guest interviews. He still does weekly Kraken segments, and Woods hopes he can start expanding upon those with interviews as well.

For now, the only Kraken interview Pelter has done was with the team’s former senior vice president, Todd Humphrey, a Mercer Island resident, two years ago as an eighth grader. Pelter attends his share of Kraken games with his father, David, 56, but he’s too young to drive and can’t get out to any practices because of school.

Still, given his tremendous amount of Kraken will, he figures he’ll eventually find a way.

In addition to his hockey and podcast work, Pelter last year also began calling play-by-play of his school’s football, soccer, and lacrosse games and is continuing this fall.

Pelter lists his broadcasting influences as – naturally – John Forslund and Eddie Olczyk, but also Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Gus Johnson. And while he doesn’t take after any particular broadcaster’s style, he’s noted the subtleties in delivery throughout the various sports and the cadence, pauses, and catchphrases associated with each.

He gained an early fascination with sports from his father, a University of Michigan alum who put him on to all things Wolverines. His father played hockey recreationally as a goalie and got him into that sport, starting locally at age 3 until he was about 6.

“I’m a massive sports fan,” Pelter said. “It’s been my favorite thing in the world for as long as I can remember. Just watching sports or playing Madden (video game football) or EA Sports NHL, hearing just the broadcasting and their voices describing it, painted such a perfect picture. And I just think it’s super fun to be doing that.”

And a broadcast career is now his goal, especially if he can find something in hockey. Pelter recently took up the sport recreationally again and said there’s something about watching Kraken games that sets them apart from other sports he watches.

“I love the high tempo, the fast pace, just the nature of the game,” he said. “I love the energy around the game, the atmosphere. When a goal goes in, it’s just unlike anything you’ve ever felt.”

A feeling “Kraken Max” would love to someday be describing on-air in real time. For now, he’ll stick with his weekly Kraken reports and try to grow them along with his favorite, fast-improving team.