Credit: Steve Dangle
Steve Dangle has become an icon in the Toronto Maple Leafs community, particularly known for his candid and often humorous reactions to the team’s ups and downs. When the Leafs suffer their annual defeat in the first round of the NHL playoffs or lose to a 42-year-old zamboni driver, Leafs fans are eager to watch Steve Dangle’s reaction to the repeated heartbreak in one of his YouTube videos.
Dangle is known for his YouTube series, ‘ Leafs Fan Reaction,’ which is usually shortened to LFR, where he reacts to every Toronto Maple Leafs game. He created his own podcast network called ‘The Steve Dangle Podcast’ with two of his closest friends, Adam Wylde and Jesse Blake. Dangle also hosts ‘Watch a Leafs game with Steve Dangle’ which aired on Sportsnet’s YouTube channel while he was working for the network, but has switched over to the SDPN channel for the past couple of years.
Credit: Steve Dangle
“I wanted to start my own channel to give myself some more on camera experience, but it was also kind of an exercise in discipline,” says Dangle, in an interview with XFM news. “I was in my second year of school when I started my YouTube channel. There are a lot of parts of me that, you know, felt outmatched and out of my league with a lot of my colleagues and just behind in terms of practical experience. A lot of them had jobs in the industry or internships. I just felt like I was falling behind in that regard.”
While attending Ryserson University in 2008, Dangle says that he and a lot of his classmates were worried about the ongoing recession “We’re looking at each other and we’re looking at the industry and we’re like, there’s going to be no jobs. There’s going to be nowhere to work, and it was kind of a panic time.”
This continues to be an ongoing issue in 2024, as we are seeing hundreds of job cuts in radio, television, journalism, and sports journalism every year. Bell Media cut 4,800 jobs and sold 48 of their radio stations in February 2024, and CBC/Radio-Canada laid off 141 employees and eliminated 205 vacant positions in December, 2023.
Despite all of these layoffs and cutbacks, there has never been more ways to start your own brand via YouTube, Twitch, and social media.
Credit: SDPN
“I made a video after the first Leaf game in the 2007-2008 season, with no plan in mind” says Dangle, “then I made one after the second game and I decided to myself at some point between games two and three, I was like, you know what? I’m going to try to do this for every game. I missed a few, but not many over the years. I’m heading into season 18, I think I’ve missed 7 or 8 videos. I’ve missed one video this past season because my daughter was born. And then usually the standard is unless someone dies, I’m making the video.”
The Steve Dangle YouTube channel has over 80-million total views across 2,700 videos with 236,000 subscribers.
“I think people want something different, we can have our own thing and people find us entertaining enough to watch it. It’s really good to have options.”
If you want to hear the full interview with Steve Dangle, you can listen to our conversation on the Almost 107 podcast episode “The Evolution of Sports Broadcasting (part 2)” wherever you get your podcasts.
Also a part of the podcast episode is Rick Zamperin, who worked for the Hamilton radio station CHML for 23 years. Zamperin was the play-by-play commentator for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats for 8 years. Back in August, the CHML radio station was shut down after 96 years. Zamperin decided to create his own YouTube series, The 5th Quarter Show with Rick Zamperin, that airs live after every single Tiger-Cats game.
