College instructor goes 'Bananas'
· Yahoo Sports
Jul. 3—Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City will be filled with fans watching the baseball entertainment of the popular Savannah Bananas Friday and Saturday night, but ironically the one native Iowan on the Bananas creative broadcast team won't be there.
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Creston native Adam Bochart has been employed by the Savannah Bananas since January, directing and designing in-stadium videos shown on game day. In December 2025 he ended his final semester as a broadcasting professor at his alma mater, Northwest Missouri State.
On the same nights as the Bananas take on one of the organization's other teams, The Firefighters, in the home of the Iowa Hawkeyes football team, Bochart will work on production of a similar show in Midland, Texas, between the Texas Tailgaters and The Party Animals.
"We have six teams under the same umbrella," Bochart said. "I'm most associated right now with the Texas Tailgaters. We kind of have a western cowboy, barbecue theme to our team. We do most of our tours in Texas, West Virginia and that region. We had the biggest Banana Ball show ever at Texas A&M's Kyle Field with 102,000 people."
The other Banana Ball teams are the Loco Beach Coconuts (with a Hawaiian theme) and the Indianapolis Clowns, built on the traditions of the Indianapolis Clowns of the historic Negro League.
"The Indianapolis Clowns were a barnstorming team that entertained fans from the 1950s through the 1980s," Bochart said. "The Savannah Bananas partnered with the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City to have a team doing what the Bananas do now, but also telling their original story of the Indianapolis Clowns."
Bochart is among the technical coordinators from the team's entertainment division that sets up in-stadium images and videos on the video boards. He gets to tap into his teaching background by working with stadium operations employees at the various venues around the country to display the videos as planned.
"Anything on the big screens comes from me, content-wise and through me, camera-wise," Bochart noted. "I build out 400 to 500 elements for that ballpark ahead of time. Every ballpark has different specs and software. Then when we travel in I make sure that they look like they are supposed to look so we can use them while directing the show."
For eight months a year, it's largely life on the road.
"Most weeks I'm in the (Savannah) office two days a week, depending on the size of the stadium that we will be in later that week," Bochart said. "When we go into a stadium, we may have a rehearsal day on Wednesday if we put out two or three days of shows around the weekend. Then we repeat it all at a new location the next week. Our season is as long as the major leagues, from February through October."
Banana Ball style
So, what is Banana Ball? One way to describe it is the baseball equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters in basketball. It's a different, entertaining way to display the sport under a different set of rules.
However, in this case it's actual competitive baseball on the field without a scripted winner.
"These are actually very skilled baseball players doing their best to play the game as we have changed it or the fans," Bochart said. "Nobody knows which team is going to win that night before it starts."
Rosters are typically composed of former college, minor-league and independent league players.
"We look for the right people for our culture," Bochart said. "We want people who want to have fun. Every decision we make, in every one of our technical meetings, we always ask if an idea is something better for the fans? If it is, then we want to do it. We're constantly changing things in our game night. It's a fluid script."
The rules are modified to keep things moving, funny and entertaining for fans of all ages in the designated two-hour time period. Whereas traditional baseball is played as long as it takes to complete nine innings, the Banana Ball game stops at the two-hour mark.
Scoring is done differently. It's more like match play, where the team that wins an inning gets a point. So, even if one team scores 10 runs in the top half of the inning and the other team scores one run in the bottom half, the top half team gets one point and a new scoring segment begins in the next inning.
The one deviation from that system is that all runs scored in the ninth inning count toward the final score.
"We get to the end of most games with a really close score," Bochart notes, "and then anything can happen in a wild ninth inning."
Also, bunting is outlawed.
"That's because bunting sucks," Bochart said, dryly. "It's not what the fans are there to see."
There are no walks on ball four. The batter must sprint. And he gets to run the bases for as long as it takes for all nine players in the field to touch the ball. So, it's a rapid-fire game of catch among the fielders.
The fun segments between innings and even during a game can include the Banana Nanas (an ensemble of line dancing women, all 65 years or older, with routines set to the latest radio hits); and the Man-Nanas (a hilarious group of men that rile up attendees with "dad bod cheerleading" and free T-shirts thrown into the stands. Team members may perform TikTok dances in the stands or perform stunts on the field.
Like the Globetrotters' system, there are traditional "bits" the fans of Banana Ball want to see, and then a variety of new twists designed to go with each game.
"For the Iowa City shows, for example, we talked about what we could do that would be Iowa-related," Bochart said.
The games are sold out. The Bananas' official ticket lottery closed on Oct. 31, 2025 for this season. Tickets are reasonably priced, starting at $35 each when purchased through the lottery. (Tickets can be higher on third-party ticket platforms.)
All games are shown on the Savannah Bananas YouTube feed, free of charge, and there are also partnerships with several television platforms such as TruTV, CW, Disney and ESPN. (Friday's game in Kinnick Stadium can be viewed on TruTV and the Savannah Bananas YouTube channel. Saturday's game will be shown on Roku Sports Channel and the Bananas YouTube.)
Career change
Bochart had been a fixture at Northwest Missouri State University for more than a decade, first as a student earning bachelor's and master's degrees from the university while working in electronic media production and TV directing. He also was a director for CatVision, the sports broadcasting program for the university at events such as home football games.
Bochart, now 31, was then a Communication and Mass Media instructor on campus for 6 1/2 years. He taught multiple classes and worked with KNWT, the student-run campus TV station, and students involved with CatVision productions.
Bochart said he first saw some interesting social media posts about the Savannah Bananas about seven years ago.
"I loved how goofy it was," Bochart said. "Tickets were impossible to get, and are still impossible, which is why we have a lottery system in distributing our tickets. I entered that lottery every year and I eventually did go to a game in Des Moines in 2023."
Bochart applied for a position similar to his current job in 2024, and was granted an interview, but did not get hired.
"I told them to keep me in mind," Bochart said. "I believe in what they're doing. We go into stadiums, and even the baseball purists that have been working in their booths will come away after working with us saying, 'That's the most fun I've had working a baseball game!' If you're not leaving one of our shows smiling, then something went wrong."
Two years after that initial interview, Bochart was hired as a technical coordinator in August 2025. But, he was given a grace period to wrap up the fall semester that was about to start at Northwest Missouri State.
"They were kind enough to let me do one more semester of teaching," Bochart said. "So, I moved down there after Christmas and joined them on Jan. 6, right in the middle of their preseason. I hit the ground running."
Bochart and his girlfriend, Alex Snyder, met at Northwest Missouri State and she was also on the university's faculty.
"We made the jump together here," Bochart said. "She is substitute teaching right now and is actually part of our First Impressions Team with the Bananas."
That unit helps fans who call in or stop into the local headquarters with any issues or questions they have.
"I'm excited to be a part of something that's growing so quickly and has a really cool mission statement," Bochart told the Northwest Missourian earlier this year. "They really do put the fans first in everything that they do."