This week, The CW revealed its on-air team for coverage of the NASCAR Xfinity Series in 2025.
Adam Alexander will be on play-by-play with Jamie McMurray and Parker Kligerman alongside. Dillon Welch and Kim Coon will be the pit reporters, while Carla Gebhart will host NASCAR Countdown Live, the series’ pre-race show.
On paper, this group shows that Nexstar is taking its new NASCAR property quite seriously. Adam Alexander brings a lot of experience to the table. He’s already going to be the play-by-play commentator for the NASCAR Cup Series races on both Amazon Prime Video and TNT. He previously had the role with TNT from 2010-2014.
In regards to the Xfinity Series, the move brings continuity. Alexander has served as the play-by-play commentator for Xfinity races on FOX Sports 1 for the past 10 seasons. He’s intimately familiar with the series, the big names, teams and the overall feel of the series. Also, having Alexander there likely wouldn’t mean a big change in feel for the broadcasts. That’s something longtime viewers will like.
What will be different for viewers and for Alexander is that he has permanent boothmates in Kligerman and McMurray. Seems crazy in retrospect, but Alexander had been forced to deal with a revolving crew of guest analysts for an entire decade, ranging from really good to really bad.
Back in 2016, I described the situation as being similar to the fourth season of the original American Gladiators (1992-93) after a bunch of the gladiators got fired in a dispute over royalties or injured. That resulted in a bunch of inexperienced gladiators getting thrust into the spotlight just as the strongest contenders to ever be on the show started showing up. In other words, they got torched.
American Gladiators retooled their gladiator lineup and had a good group of them for the fifth season. For Alexander, every year in the Xfinity booth might as well have been a repeat of 2015 because of all of the guests.
Out of all those guest analysts came McMurray. When he was announced as a guest analyst in 2017, I don’t think anyone knew what to expect. I went in with an open mind for his debut in Las Vegas. The result ended up being very good as he was informative and worked quite well with Alexander.
My hope is that McMurray would be able to do TV work. He ultimately ended up as a regular analyst on NASCAR RaceHub and got to do more guest work. However, FOX Sports didn’t really see much of a future for him calling races, especially once they hired Kevin Harvick.
With The CW, McMurray will have his first full-time chance in the broadcast booth. The hope is that he can channel the rapport that he had with Alexander on RaceHub to race broadcasts. I think that it’s feasible.
Kligerman comes to The CW after splitting time between pit reporting for NBC Sports and driving in the Xfinity Series and the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in recent years. He’ll continue to race in the Truck Series for Henderson Motorsports in 2025, which will give him that all-important on-track knowledge.
He’s also fresh out of the car in the Xfinity Series, so he’ll be very familiar with what drivers will be experiencing with the current cars. There’s no substitute for having run 69 Xfinity races since 2022.
While Kligerman has years’ worth of pit reporting experience and studio experience, he has next to no experience as a booth analyst. He’ll likely need to draw back on some of the experience he had on NASCAR Victory Lap to help him out. In addition, I could see him having to lean a bit on McMurray for some advice early on since booth work is very different from being in the pits or in a studio.
Regardless, Kligerman is pumped for his new job in 2025.
I like that attitude. He understands that this is going to be a learning experience, especially at first. Given what we’ve seen out of Kligerman over the past few years, I think he could be good in the role. At bare minimum, he’ll have some insight about the Xfinity Series that a lot of people might not be all that familiar with.
Remember, we’re talking about a man who hasn’t always been with the top teams. Yes, he was once a Penske development driver. However, he spent much of that time farmed out to outfits such as Team 42 or K-Automotive before going to the Trucks.
After the collapse of Swan Racing in 2014 eight races into what was supposed to be a Rookie of the Year campaign in the Cup Series, he scratched and clawed part-time all the way until he got the ride for 2023 with Big Machine Racing. He knows what you have to do to get big opportunities in NASCAR, especially when you don’t necessarily have a pile of money to throw at people.
In the pits, Coon and Welch both come from NBC Sports and have a decent amount of experience now. Generally, they’ve done well in their positions. I just expect them to keep it up.
For NASCAR Countdown Live, you have a new face to on-air work in the sport with Gebhart. Admittedly, I had never heard of her prior to Tuesday’s announcement.
A quick check indicates that she is the sports director at Nexstar-owned WJZY 46 in Charlotte, N.C., also known as FOX Charlotte. This is the same station that FOX Sports hired Josh Sims from back in 2021. She’s worked there since 2020, has been the sports director for 17 months and hosts a local sports show that covers NASCAR in addition to stick and ball sports.
Over the past few years, WJZY has worked together with WGHP FOX 8 out of Greensboro, N.C. to air local NASCAR programs in and around big races. They have sent a crew to Daytona for the past couple of years to air a live pre-race show that is syndicated to Nexstar-owned and/or operated stations. Note that Nexstar is the second-largest owner of local TV stations in the United States behind only the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The co-produced shows they did at Darlington and Charlotte after the season restarted in 2020 are part of the reason why FOX Sports hired Sims.
The brief bio linked above indicates that she also previously worked for NASCAR. According to her LinkedIn page, that was for a year in an undisclosed video role prior to joining FOX Charlotte. I am unclear whether or not that was in front of or behind the camera.
I’m not really sure what Gebhart’s role is going to look like. I wouldn’t be shocked if she ends up with a role similar to what Shannon Spake had on NASCAR RaceDay – Xfinity Edition where she doesn’t go to the races and hosts pre-race coverage from NASCAR’s new production center in Charlotte. Also, if she’s working on the broadcast from Charlotte, is she doing it solo from there, or will she have someone in the studio to bounce things off of?
From what I can see, The CW is going about their new Xfinity Series slate the right way. They’re bringing in people who know what they’re talking about, are going to take the job seriously and have fun with it. This is a group that generally knows what they’re doing and I believe that the fans will like what The CW will deliver this year.
I really hope that the booth will be present on-site at all 33 races this year. I don’t know if that will be the case or not, but we’ve seen plenty of evidence over the years that being off-site can really hurt the on-air product. If I would guess, the most likely remote broadcast of the year would be Portland since that race is scheduled for Labor Day weekend.
Of The CW’s sports properties, the Xfinity Series has some of the best viewership. If they play their cards right, this could be the right group to help the series’ audience grow.
Phil Allaway has three primary roles at Frontstretch. He's the manager of the site's FREE e-mail newsletter that publishes Monday-Friday and occasionally on weekends. He keeps TV broadcasters honest with weekly editions of Couch Potato Tuesday and serves as the site's Sports Car racing editor.
Outside of Frontstretch, Phil is the press officer for Lebanon Valley Speedway in West Lebanon, N.Y. He covers all the action on the high-banked dirt track from regular DIRTcar Modified racing to occasional visits from touring series such as the Super DIRTcar Series.
Sounds great… sure wish we got the CW here in Columbia, SC. I used to watch all the Xfinity races. Now I get to watch zero.
Carl,
From what I can tell, Columbia, S.C. does get The CW. It’s on Channel 10.2, a subchannel of WIS. It seems like some of the local pay-tv outlets don’t get it, though.