By Mike Gibson
For the Wire
Bensalem native Jeff Skversky, shown here interviewing Philadelphia Flyer Danny Briere, works for Channel 6 as a weekend sports anchor. A Bensalem High School graduate, Skversky held positions in Georgia and New York before relocating to the Philadelphia area.
Jeff Skversky may have taken a roundabout route from Bensalem to the Channel 6 studios on City Line Avenue, but he says it was certainly worth the journey.
“To me, it’s the greatest job ever in the greatest place ever,” he said of his position as the station’s weekend sports anchor. “I haven’t thought beyond this. After all, this is the station I grew up watching and I’m working with the people I grew up watching.”
In order to do that, Skversky had to endure stops and sometimes joblessness in Macon, Ga., Atlantic City, N.J., St. Louis, Baltimore and Syracuse before coming back home to do the weekend sports for Channel 6.
For Skversky, it all started with doing high school games on the Owls Television Network, an in-house part of the Audio Visual Department at Bensalem High School.
“By the time I was in high school, I knew I wasn’t going to be a professional baseball player,” he said. “I told myself I was probably better off doing something else and I knew I loved sports. I was a big Phillies, Eagles, Sixers fan.”
“Bensalem had this TV station and I did morning updates and play-by-play for the high school basketball team,” he said. “If I had one piece of advice, it would be to learn how to write a little bit and I learned how to write updates and things like that for the high school station.”
That led Skversky to pursue a communications degree from Temple University and he made the transition from being a Bensalem Owl to a Temple Owl, graduating in 2001 with a B.A.
“Looking at schools, Temple was the best option for me,” he said. “I started writing for the school newspaper, then I worked at the TV station at Temple, then I started sending out demo tapes for my first job.”
That first job turned out to be at a Macon, Ga., TV station. When he got there, they told him that they “ran out of money and were going to be doing weekend news for awhile. Here I was in Macon, Ga., excited as you can be and, boom, out of a job as soon as I got there.”
So he headed home and within six weeks got a job at the NBC-TV affiliate in Atlantic City, WMGM-TV.
“It was an hour-and-a-half from home and it was perfect,” Skversky said. “I was doing a lot of high school stuff and some Eagles’ highlights.”
After a year-and-a-half, Skversky relocated to Syracuse, N.Y., where he was the weekend sports anchor for three-and-a-half years.
“It was crazy,” he said of his time in Syracuse. “Usually, your first day on the job you are doing mundane stuff, like turning on the computer and filling out paperwork. But my first day, [Syracuse University star and current New York Knick] Carmelo Anthony announces he was coming out of school. So that’s the biggest story up there and there I was covering it.”
Following Syracuse, Skversky had a stint in St. Louis — which included covering a Cardinals’ World Series win — “before the economy tanked and they slashed our sports department.”
Once again, Skversky found himself 1,000 miles away from home without a job.
“I flew home and stayed with my parents for a couple of months, freelancing for Fox29 when the Phillies won the World Series,” he said. “Then Channel 6 asked me to come in for an interview. I watched Channel 6 all my life and so did my family and when they called and told me I got the job, it was the greatest feeling of my career.
“All of those people that I work with now are iconic to me,” he added.
“The first time I anchored, I was sitting between Jim Gardner and Dave Roberts and I had to pinch myself and say, ‘What am I doing here?’ I had to go back to reading the script and get my thoughts together before I went live.
“For me, I’m a huge baseball fan, so to see the Phillies win it all in 2008 and to personally cover it was the №1 thing in terms of the things I covered,” he said. “The next thing was the Flyers’ Stanley Cup run in 2010. They were supposed to be eliminated, but they were a team playing on borrowed time and the next thing you know, they are in the Stanley Cup Finals.”
Occasionally, Skversky says he’ll think of those jobless days in Macon and St. Louis and appreciate where he’s at now.
“I did earn it and the opportunity wasn’t handed to me,” he said. “I’m going to be here four-and-a-half years in August and every once in awhile I tell myself I don’t want to ever take it for granted and want to appreciate it.”
