Howard Chen

Howard Chen is FOX Toledo's Sports Director, anchoring both the Hardcore Blitz, and then Hardcore Sports during weekends. He is also "Mr. Fantasy" for the weekly Mr. Fantasy's Weekly Watch segment .

Howard joined the Hardcore Sports team in late July 2005, but the path to Toledo wasn't an easy one.  He overcame Super Typhoon Haitang during a vacation to Taiwan prior to joining FOX Toledo.

With airports closed down, Howard's arrival to FOX Toledo was delayed, but he's glad to have made it back in one piece.

Howard is an active member of the Asian American Journalists Association, and while he considers himself to be one of the only Asian-Canadian-Texans around (born in Calgary, attended high school in Houston), Howard's been in Ohio since 2002.

That's when he started a two-and-a-half-year stint as a sports anchor and sports reporter at WHIZ-TV, the NBC affiliate in Zanesville.  In 2005, Howard was named the Ohio Associated Press top choice as TV sportscaster for small-market stations in the state.  He was also part of Ohio's top AP small-market television sports operation in 2004 and 2005.  Howard has kept the winning tradition alive in Toledo, as Hardcore Sports won the AP's Best Regularly Scheduled Sports award for Ohio medium-market television in 2007.

Howard is a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism, and minored in Speech Communications.  He's proud to have covered Orange football, basketball, and lacrosse for WAER Sports during his collegiate years.

Those were also the final years of Howard's competitive table tennis career.  He once qualified for a week-long, all-expenses-paid training session with the USA national team's head coach at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and also twice represented Syracuse at the ACUI Collegiate Table Tennis Nationals.

But playing sports and talking about sports are two different things.  Howard realized early on that sports reporting was his true calling, though he'll admit that he never imagined he would become Mr. Fantasy, both on FOX Toledo and on FOX Sports Radio AM 1230 WCWA.

As for hobbies, Howard likes to cook food and then eat it afterwards.

Email Howie at hchen@foxtoledo.com