Podcasts about Calgary, Alberta

"Team Tank, all you wanted. Let's go." That is the call on Sportsnet Today 960 with 81 games played and one more Flames loss standing between Calgary and the third-best odds at the top pick in the draft. Most of the Calgary listening on this page comes from that spring. A fourth straight playoff miss had turned Flames talk toward lottery odds, prospects and a rebuild, and each of the hockey shows takes that story from a different chair. The rest step off the ice: Alberta politics on Shaye Ganam, business change on Collisions YYC, student life on Choose UCalgary Podcast, and CFL football and golf stories on Sports Talk with Jock Wilson.

What Calgary is

Calgary is Alberta's largest city. It sits where the Bow and Elbow rivers meet, with the Rocky Mountains to the west. It grew from a ranching and railway town into the head-office centre of Canada's oil and gas industry, hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics, and stages the Calgary Stampede each July. Its professional teams are the NHL's Flames, who play at the Saddledome, and the CFL's Stampeders.

Cheering for the lottery

In the Dome: Calgary Flames Fan Podcast keeps coming back to the tank. Its titles read like a ticker from the bottom of the standings ("Tank looking immaculate", "The tank race is coming down to the wire!", "A Flamesy end to a solid tank season"). Its clips are two fans talking fast and profanely, mocking one minute and grudgingly hopeful the next. One clip does the arithmetic of a strange year: Calgary 30th in the league and still only seven points outside a Western Conference playoff spot. Another frets that Chicago could pair Connor Bedard with Gavin McKenna for the next 15 years. At the season's end they fix on a Zane Parekh goal, "the sickest goal we've seen on Flames ice". They treat it as the exclamation point on his rookie year, and one of them says it almost makes losing the lottery worth it.

The Sportsnet 960 The Fan shows follow the same stretch through the people in it. On Sportsnet Today 960, in "Locker Cleanout Day: Hour 3", Ryan Huska says Calgary's players showed "zero mail-in" effort with nothing left to play for. Big Show with Rusic & Rose, with George Rusic and Matt Rose, adds up the season. Calgary rookies played 403 games, more than the previous four seasons combined, and Flames fans honoured Anze Kopitar in his final regular-season appearance at the Saddledome. Both shows come back to Arseny Sergeyev. On Sportsnet Today 960 he describes waking up in the minors and learning he would make his NHL debut that night. The Big Show follows him from minor-league goaltender to NHL starter overnight, stopping all 10 shots he faced in period one. Its titles also stray from hockey, as far as "Blue Jays Early Struggles w/ Kevin Barker".

The rebuild, worked through

Locked On Flames - Daily Podcast On The Calgary Flames is the most methodical of the hockey shows: one voice, Ryan G, setting down a premise and qualifying it as he goes. His clip on Calgary's elimination, a 4-3 loss to Dallas, turns straight to an offseason in which Craig Conroy heads into a "full rebuild". The same clip sets up a this-week-in-history look at a Calgary team that ousted a defending Stanley Cup champion, and a talk about the season with one of the Flames Unfiltered hosts. Other clips name a prospect the show rates as the best playmaker Calgary has had since Johnny Gaudreau. They also set a 3-1 loss to Colorado against the 9-2 blowout of the teams' earlier meeting. In July the titles stay on prospects, contracts and trades, as in "CONTRACT: Calgary Flames Extend Simon Nemec For SHORTER Term, Who's Next?"

Flames Unfiltered - Calgary Flames Hockey Podcast takes the same rebuild as a conversation between two fans, Brad Burud and Kyle Lewis. They start, stop and double back, and do not hide their frustration. Their trade-deadline clips replay the day in order. First came Colorado talk, then Montreal talk, then Ryan Strom arriving from Anaheim for a seventh-round pick and a McKenzie Weegar deal. Last was a late Nazem Kadri move, with 20% retained, that brought back a pair of draft picks plus Victor Olofsson and Maximilian Curran. The mood runs from "Just blind rage" to a shrug: not mad, just confused. Elsewhere they argue that a Conor Zary hit from behind drew only three games because the league handles player safety badly.

Football and golf, from 2020

Sports Talk with Jock Wilson is older listening; its clips date from July 2020, and it is the show where CFL football leads. It sounds like a loose sports-radio hangout built on stories and teasing. In "Friday Fun Time with Derek Bidwell and Nik Lewis", Nik Lewis credits Michael Irvin's physical receiving style for shaping his CFL game. He also recalls Jermaine Copeland warning him against becoming a great player who bounces from team to team. Pro golfer Graham DeLaet ranks Rio above Augusta, partly because Canada came in as defending champion "from, like, 1905 or something". Titles such as "Checking in with Stamps head coach Dave Dickenson" and "Catching up with Alex Singleton" keep the Stampeders in view.

Pipelines, productivity and a campus

The civic argument that plays here is provincial rather than municipal. Shaye Ganam sounds like live, deadline-driven radio: a quick setup, a direct question, a brisk follow-up. One clip from "Pipelines, Poilievre, Prediction Markets" starts with a coal project in the south that could be shut down by petition. It moves on to the separation question adding to the uncertainty, and then to who wants pipelines if nobody can make money on them. Its titles keep returning to separation, the EU and taxation, and often name a guest by role: a Bentley farmer with the Alberta Canola Producers Commission, a policy adviser, an economics professor. The show also reaches past Alberta. One clip explains why Artemis II's reentry is one of the two most dangerous parts of any space mission. In another, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen describes seeing three-dimensional depth in the galaxy from lunar orbit.

Collisions YYC comes at the economy from the business side. Its interviews are measured and keep pulling strategy back to concrete consequences. Hugo Lafontaine says Canada is "about 10 quarters" into a productivity decline against the U.S. He argues that a plant that puts off co-bots may find in five years that nobody will take the jobs, leaving it ten years behind rather than five. Bri Falls describes League's effort to uncouple careers from companies and put control back with the individual. Kevin Crowe says AI should let Longview become "10,000 people" with better careers, not "100 people" maximizing profit.

Choose UCalgary Podcast shows the University of Calgary through its students, and it deals in specifics. A student named Michaela describes a rocket exchange that flew students to Norway, covered food, stay and travel, and put her on the launch team. Precious describes "micro placements" of 30 to 40 hours over eight weeks, with no interview. An admissions clip explains that GCE applicants can meet English language proficiency with three years of GCSE, with no IELTS or Duolingo needed. Its titles move through student clubs, the Schulich Soundstage, the UCalgary Recover Community and the Writing Symbols Lodge.

Where to start

• The rebuild, reasoned out: Locked On Flames - Daily Podcast On The Calgary Flames.
• The tank from the fan side: In the Dome: Calgary Flames Fan Podcast, or Flames Unfiltered - Calgary Flames Hockey Podcast for trade-deadline day.
• Alberta politics and policy: Shaye Ganam.
• Business change, AI and work in Western Canada: Collisions YYC.

The Calgary feed on this page plays clips from these shows.