My wife and daughter were watching Olympic Gold Medalist Suni Lee compete for the Auburn Tigers in SEC gymnastics last night and I thought about how far we’ve come in broadcasting now that the larger college athletic conferences have their own networks while smaller conference teams live stream their games. Then I thought about the role I played in college sports broadcasting.
In spring of 1986, I was a
sophomore at William Paterson College (it’s now a university) in Wayne, NJ. I was a business major but my campus
activities included working at the college’s closed circuit “radio” station and
the concert crew, working as local crew for shows by The Ramones, Cheap Trick,
George Thorogood, The Smithereens and others.
Most of my college friends in radio and concerts were communication
majors and I realized that to pursue my passion in sports, music and production,
I needed to change my major.
In order to change majors, I had
to meet with the Chair of the Department of Communications, who met me with
great enthusiasm at the prospect of swelling her ranks. She promptly asked what area of study I
wished to concentrate on (choices were Radio and TV or Interpersonal Communication). When I answered, “Radio and TV,” her enthusiastic
smile turned sour and she promptly replied, “There are already 36 channels of
TV on cable. There won’t be more jobs in
that area.”
She could not have been more incorrect! Indeed, we’ve now got hundreds of channels,
live-streaming, concert video production, and sports teams with their own video
production departments. I later learned
our Chair’s interests were in the Interpersonal Communications area and that
she was a bit of an academic snob who thought radio and TV were for trade
schools and not college campuses.
Two years later I was running the
closed-circuit radio station, working concerts, working in the college’s campus
cable TV head end and public access channel master control, and using my spare time
to master the school’s TV production studio equipment in my senior year when
the Chair called me in to offer me a Graduate Assistantship. She wanted me to help the college build a
real radio station as William Paterson had just received a license from the FCC
to operate an FM radio station.
This was 1988. Colleges simply didn’t do this in 1988, but
we did, thanks to the help of two school engineers – the late John Kiernan and
Dan Cleary – who put the equipment together and accompanied us on Friday
nights. When football season ended, we
did basketball, complete with lavaliere microphones taped under the backboard
to pick up sneaker noise and the “swish” of the ball going through the
rim. In the spring, we used 5 cameras to
do baseball, including a centerfield pitch camera and a high camera behind home
plate to catch the action.
When I say, “colleges simply didn’t
do this in 1988,” that’s the truth. The
equipment we used was from the theater and was used to record jazz concerts,
but with theater renovation underway, I was one of the student workers who was
supposed to move all the gear to storage during the renovation when I hatched
the idea of doing multicamera live sports coverage. We were New Jersey’s first school to
broadcast its sports games. To my
knowledge, we may have been first in the nation. Of course, the big school’s football and
basketball programs were broadcast on the networks by network production
crews. Smaller Division I schools never got
on TV. Division III? Forget about it. But we did at William Paterson. And as equipment became cheaper fifteen years
ago and streaming gave schools and conferences the opportunity to reach their audience
easily and inexpensively, conference networks were born.
Now the Big 10 Network and others broadcast or livestream all of a university’s sports events, from football to field hockey and from basketball to lacrosse. That’s how my wife and daughter now manage to watch Suni Lee compete for Auburn on Friday nights (she scored her first perfect 10 last night).
We’ve come a long way
in 33 years. The number of media production
jobs has increased exponentially. In
1995, I became the first full-time video editor hired by an NHL team (and maybe
any pro team in America) when the New Jersey Devils hired me as their Coordinator
of Game Entertainment. I’ve since worked
on the in-house video board production crew at a Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup
Finals, the NBA Finals and thousands of soccer, football, basketball and hockey
games. As a video journalist, I’ve covered
a few PGA Championships, the US Open in golf and tennis, UFC fights and boxing
championships with my own equipment. I
had the opportunity to spend three hours at Mario Andretti’s home interviewing
the greatest race car driver ever and touring his trophy room, sports bar and
garage. On video journalism gigs, I
shoot on either my $3,500 camcorder and/or my $1,800 DSLR and then upload the
video files to a file server for my client, who is based in London, UK. The technology today is truly amazing. Oh, and that Department Chair who
tried to dissuade me from majoring in Radio and TV in 1986, she came around to
realize the value of Radio and TV. The
radio station we built at William Paterson has become a world-recognized
station, earning multiple Marconi Awards for excellence in college radio, while
WPC-TV Sports eventually moved into a real TV Truck and traveled out-of-state
to bring William Paterson College baseball’s two Division III Championships (1992
and 1996) to viewers here in New Jersey.
Where will we be 30 years from
now? Who knows? I’m glad to have played a role at the
forefront of media production in sports.
