We are Sixteen Eight Oh Three Media

Most people who want to build media for your program have never been in your building.

We have. One of us has been running one for 26 years.

16803 Media is four guys who've known each other since childhood, and between us we've spent our careers on both sides of the table you're sitting at. A head coach with the most wins in his program's history. A chief creative officer who's produced hundreds of podcasts, including one Forbes called "podcasting at its finest." A consultant who fixes broken operations for a living. And a guy who's spent decades walking into coaches' offices for Jostens, listening to what programs actually need.

That mix matters. Media people don't understand coaches — they pitch a content strategy and wonder why nobody calls back. And coaches don't have time to become media people. We sit in the middle, and we're not translating from a textbook.

We're also not selling you a theory. The Juniata Men's Basketball Show isn't a case study in a deck — it's a real show, with a real audience and real sponsors, run by a coach who still has a season to coach. We built it from nothing and made every mistake available to us. So when we say a Coach's Show will do more for your program than anything else on your list, we're not guessing. We're telling you what happened to us.

And we're not here to turn you into a brand. You already are one. We're here to make sure the people who care about your program actually get to hear from you.

Meet the Team

  • Greg Curley

    HEAD COACH

    Heading into his 26th season as head basketball coach at Juniata College, where he's the winningest coach in program history. He's our inside man. He knows what coaches will actually do, what they'll say they'll do, and what they will never in a thousand years do — the single most valuable intel in this business.

  • Tom Frank

    HEAD OF PRODUCTION

    Co-host of The Juniata Men's Basketball Show and the guy building it behind the scenes. 26+ years in brand and marketing; partner and Chief Creative Officer at Merrick Creative. He's produced hundreds of podcasts, including The Lupe and Royce Show with Lupe Fiasco and Royce da 5'9", which Forbes called "podcasting at its finest."

  • Drew Besket

    HEAD OF OPERATIONS

    Half the Lemont contingent and the entertaining sidekick on the Juniata show. In his actual life, an award-winning consultant with a long track record of optimizing revenue cycle operations across industries — which is to say, he is the reason this company has a spreadsheet at all.

  • Greg Albert

    HEAD OF SALES

    You've seen him on the show plenty of times. What you may not know: he's one of the longest-tenured members of the Jostens family, running sports and championship sales across the East Coast. He's been sitting in coaches' offices for decades. He speaks the language fluently, because he's been listening the whole time.

The 16803 Origin Story

There are four of us. Two grew up in Park Forest Village, a 1956 subdivision outside State College, Pennsylvania, that won national awards for having curvy streets instead of straight ones. Two grew up in Lemont, a historic village at the base of Mount Nittany that has a general store, a stop sign, and an unshakable sense of superiority about both.

When it came time to name the company, we did what any group of lifelong friends would do: we argued for four months and then took a vote.

Park Forest is 16803. Lemont is 16851. The vote was 2–2.

We broke the tie the only fair way available to us… by re-litigating a street hockey game from 1989. Nets made of whatever was in the garage. Score tied. Ball goes in. And at the exact moment it crosses the line, somebody yells CAR.

The Park Forest delegation maintains the ball was in before the call. The Lemont delegation maintains that CAR supersedes all, that CAR is the highest law of the street, and that a goal scored during CAR is not a goal but a crime. It went to overtime. Somebody's mom came out and told us to keep it down.

Park Forest won. 16803 or more accurately Sixteen Eight Oh Three Media it is.

The Lemont partners have accepted this outcome with grace, dignity, and a contractual guarantee that Lemont gets mentioned in the origin story, which is why you are reading this paragraph.

So: half our name is a zip code, and half our company can't stand it. That tension is basically the whole product. Every episode we record and every course we build comes out of the same place these arguments do — four people who have known each other since before they had opinions worth having, still trying to convince each other of things.

We're Sixteen Eight Oh Three Media. Half our partners agree with the name.