“We’ve discovered that not only does this work but it could be a huge opportunity to be a great success story,” says Jason Cohen, director of East Coast production for HBO. Cohen opens the doors of his nationwide productions to student workers and observers whenever possible. “Sennheiser did a phenomenal job of vetting someone who was enthusiastic, eager, hard-working, and incredibly curious. My audio team responded phenomenally to him and welcomed him with open arms.”

HBO Sports A1 Randy Flick spent two days mentoring student Dustin Gregg at Mohegan Sun Arena.

Gregg spent most of his eight hours on Friday and 19 hours on Saturday at Mohegan Sun Arena shadowing Randy Flick, the event’s A1.

“I had the opportunity to work alongside some of the best in the business, and it was really cool to get a real-world feel for everything,” he says. “I was exposed to information and situations that could never be conveyed in a classroom setting. Being out in the field adds a whole new element to the learning experience.”

Gregg has been to production compounds for events produced by NESN, MASN, and MSG network, so he has seen the technical setup for some hockey, baseball, and tennis matches. However, HBO’s boxing setup was much larger than he expected, so having Flick as a ready and willing tour guide was crucial to giving Gregg a positive experience in the compound.

“Learning the A1 position from Randy Flick is like learning basketball from Michael Jordan,” he says. “Randy was really great about showing me step-by-step everything that goes on with the audio side of things. Other times that I’ve been on shows, I was just setting up headphones and microphones, so it was really cool to be in the truck and see what goes on there.”

In addition to discussing the signal flow of the show and establishing all the communication lines — IFB and PL — Gregg worked on routing, patching, and even console setup.

“I was very perplexed by the setup and establishment of the communications lines,” he says. “After going with Randy through the entire communications system, my understanding of it improved tenfold. We went over every piece of gear and every patch made when establishing those communication lines. It took my knowledge of broadcast audio to a new level.”

Flick was very impressed with Gregg’s effort throughout the two-day show.

“I think he’ll make a great addition to someone’s broadcast audio team someday,” Flick says. “He had some good initial training with the classes that he had taken, and he was able to expand his knowledge by observing a major network operation from the inside out.”

Gregg also spent time with Paul Hoggatt, the A2 on the show and a 20-year veteran of HBO boxing. Hoggatt took him ringside to set up microphones and communications for the announce table as well as ring effects mics.

After the event, Flick extended an open invitation to Gregg to sit in on any show he does in the Northeast. Gregg also exchanged information with Cohen, who likewise is open to working with him on future shows.

“The crew would love to have him back on a future show as a working member of the team,” Cohen says. “If we can go from end to end, take someone who’s coming out of college who wants to learn more and get them into the job market by hiring them when we’re in their area, then this program is a total success.”

Both HBO and Sennheiser are interested in continuing this sponsorship at future events and will discuss the program at SVG’s College Sports Video Summit this June in Atlanta. Click here to register for the event.

The program for the meeting was developed by the WSMI membership, responding to concerns and questions raised after previous meetings. As part of the educational focus of the meeting, SVG sponsor Intelsat offered Transmission 101, a primer providing attendees the chance to ask questions and attend future training sessions related to transmission. WSMI member Lisa Gilette, SVP of on-air planning and promotions for Fox Sports Television Group, gave a presentation on decoding broadcast jargon, and students from St. John’s University and Columbia University shared their thoughts on what makes a good mentor.

Tuesday’s meeting was the most recent WSMI meeting and the first in 2010. These quarterly meetings are designed to bring together women from across the business of sports production, creation, and distribution to educate, help promote the industry, and provide networking opportunities.

To learn more about the group and receive information about upcoming events and mentoring opportunities, contact Sports Video Group Managing Editor Carolyn Braff at Carolyn@sportsvideo.org.

CBT’s unique combination of skills prepares the company to provide clients with television production facilities and remote units unparalleled in the industry. CBT Systems is a full-service systems integration firm whose commitment to the television broadcast industry is demonstrated in our knowledge, experience, and confidence.

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…Alamo Stadium’s future could be as a pro soccer, entertainment, and high school sports facility managed by Spurs Sports & Entertainment, the holding company that owns the San Antonio Spurs, Silver Stars, and Rampage. Preliminary plans discussed by SS&E and the San Antonio Independent School District last year called for a shared-use agreement that would allow SS&E to run the venerable, 70-year-old facility after teaming with the city and county to refurbish it, officials said this week. Although talks were put on hold after it was discovered that the cost to renovate the stadium and outfit it for a pro soccer team was more than $30 million, SS&E and the district haven’t ruled out renewing the discussion…

…The London 2012 Olympic Stadium has reached its full height with completion of the first of its 14 lighting towers. The erection of the 28m tower atop the inner ring of the cable-net roof takes the height of the stadium to 60m. Olympic Delivery Authority Chairman John Armitt says the lifting of the lighting towers “is a significant engineering and construction challenge … complicated by snow, wind, and rain”…

…The Baltimore Ravens and the Maryland Stadium Authority are in the final stages of putting together a second international soccer matchup at M&T Bank Stadium, on July 25, according to Terry Hasseltine, director of the Maryland Office of Sports Marketing. No other details — including which teams will participate — have been finalized, Hasseltine said. There is an outside chance the date could change, “but all discussions are leaning toward the 25th,” he said, adding that, because this is a World Cup year, European teams are reluctant to commit to an overseas trip before their regular season begins…

…Even without a trip to the Super Bowl, last year was one of the most dramatic ever for the Dallas Cowboys. Their new $1.15 billion stadium — only the third in franchise history — opened last summer, and headline-grabbing announcements stacked up as quickly as Tony Romo’s passing yards. In the stadium’s second year, changes are expected to slow to a crawl but not stop. “We are never opposed to change,” said Cowboys EVP Charlotte Anderson. “I don’t think we ever like to say that this is the way it is and it’s always going to be this way. … We are always looking for a new idea.”

“We tried to capture the college experience but through a sports lens,” says Creative Director Mark Groeschner. “We wanted to show that our approach to covering college sports is not solely about sports but a little bit about student life as well.”

To make that clear in a graphics package, the letter U in ESPNU has been designed to morph into a series of forms, from simply taking on a school’s colors to transforming into its mascot.

“We essentially wanted to make the U come to life,” Groeschner explains. “When the research and production teams talked to students, they found out that college viewers don’t just watch games on TV; they check their PDAs for scores on other games; they tweet and instant-message about their viewing experience. There’s a lot more to sports than just watching the game, and we wanted to help reinterpret the brand so that it would have a little more mass appeal.”

Taking inspiration from the 1980s MTV graphics, in which the M in MTV constantly took on different forms, Groeschner’s team set out to do the same with the U in ESPNU, making it more than just a red letter. The U will now take different shapes on-air, transforming into individual mascots and even becoming a three-dimensional college campus, complete with Greek life, a packed basketball arena, and more-prominent positioning of the network’s motto, “Never Graduate.”

Using Maya, Cinema 4D, and Adobe After Effects, ESPNU collaborated with Los Angeles-based National Television to create the graphical look. There, a team of 15 people helped morph the U into the animated mascots of teams in nearly a dozen collegiate athletic conferences.

“We designed mascots and animated mascots based on 11 different conferences, so it took a lot of manpower,” Groeschner says. “We started brainstorming the initial explorations about a year ago.”

Those explorations grew into a full universe of 15-second animations that showcase the breadth of campus life, from tailgates, to volleyball games, to the football stadium, all existing within the 3D ESPNU logo.

“Creating this universe really was a house of cards,” Groeschner explains. “It was a leap of faith, hoping that the camera moves that you saw in the wire-frame animation would come out like we envisioned in the story boards. Eventually, we found our groove and were really able to do that, but kicking off the first handful of animations was challenging.”

As of March 1, more than 70 million homes are able to enjoy these new graphics; 70.4 million homes now have access to the network. In 2009-10, ESPNU will present nearly 2,650 hours of live-event coverage, with 872 of those hours in high definition.

…Rather than rushing to try to gain public support to upgrade Sun Life Stadium, the Miami Dolphins and the South Florida Super Bowl Host Committee will bid for the 2014 Super Bowl without the promise of a partial roof and other refurbishments. Dolphins CEO Mike Dee said Tuesday that, in deference to the still struggling economy, the team is slowing renovation plans, even though that could jeopardize the 2014 bid: “We’re going to go down the road in ‘as-is’ condition to see where we fall. We felt we had a better chance in ’14 if we got this resolved and had a better solution”…

…The Pro Bowl will continue to be played before the Super Bowl, even when it returns to Honolulu next year. The Hawaii Tourism Authority and the NFL announced Tuesday that the game will be at Aloha Stadium on Jan. 30, the Sunday before the Super Bowl in Arlington, TX. The Pro Bowl historically had been played in Honolulu the week after the Super Bowl, but that was changed when it moved to Miami this year…

…Tacoma, WA’s beloved but creaky Cheney Stadium is getting a $30 million renovation, which will include 16 luxury suites, a private club, and a 5,000-sq.-ft. club and restaurant. Cheney Stadium is home to the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, an affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. As part of the deal to overhaul the stadium, the Rainiers signed a 30-year lease. The Rainiers have drawn well at Cheney Stadium, which is owned by the city of Tacoma. The city and the team are betting that new seats, luxury suites, and private club and restaurant will help bolster revenue…

…Everyone was glad to see baseball back as perennially optimistic Chicago Cubs fans flocked to Mesa, AZ’s Hohokam Stadium for Opening Day of the 2010 Cactus League season. But while more than 8,000 fans enjoyed the usual sun, beer, and hot dogs, the political questions swirling over the Cubs’ future in Mesa — and whether Arizona can somehow pass the bill to finance a new east Mesa training complex demanded by the team — seemed to cast a long shadow over an otherwise perfect spring day. “The Cubs belong here, and they need to stay here. That’s why we need your help,” Mayor Scott Smith said during a rally outside the ballpark just before game time that featured Cubs Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg.

Click here to join the College Sports Video Summit Facebook group!

“The main idea is to use this technology to bring to life large archives of video with the ability to search and deliver them in very flexible ways,” says Dan Weiner, VP of marketing and products for TEM. “If you have that long-form video associated with metadata, you can actually pull moments, assemble reels, and have an automated way to pick highlights out of our database. Given the growth in broadband-publishing technology, the Vault is another way to bring this NCAA content to life.”

Building an Archive Backbone
TEM began its work with the NCAA across all of its sports, turning shelves of videotapes into a centralized, digitized historical archive. In addition to serving as a backup, the archive can be searched and accessed by schools and alumni for commercialization and revenue opportunities.

The NCAA Vault launched this week but will be available year-round at NCAA.com/Vault.

“The Vault is the next generation of video and Web technology that brings together a couple of different pieces,” Weiner says. “Once you’ve got everything digitized, the next step is applying rich metadata against the full-length games. Every play is tagged with timecode, player, school, and score. Then we have our platform that can search, access, and deliver the video.”

Adding in that metadata required bringing together a variety of data sources. The NCAA provided official statistics and information, and TEM hired additional loggers to watch the games, tag them with additional details, and marry those streams together.

Searching for Stars
The vault contains every full-length basketball game from the Sweet Sixteen round through the championship of every NCAA Tournament from 2000 to ’09. (Additional games are already in the works). The Vault can be searched by multiple parameters, including team and year, as well as within individual games, where play-by-play timelines allow fans to jump in and out of the game at key moments.

“You’ve got a Google element of being able to search against these games,” Weiner explains. “So you can search for Carmelo, and it will pull only the plays that he participated in. The combination of metadata, plus video technology, plus the search tools, allows you to access not only video for all of the games but within the game, allows you to dig in in a way that you haven’t been able to before.”

TEM has also done some editorial curating of its own, putting together lists of great performances, top dunks, buzzer-beaters, and the like, so fans can watch just the top highlights, as chosen by the organizers of the Vault. A Publishing Guide database file also gives fans jump-in points with specific URLs, as they can search a spreadsheet by year, school, and game for direct links to the relevant moments.

Social-Media Moments
Social-media features are a key component of the interactive experience behind the NCAA Vault. Fans can comment on specific moments within the games and share them through Twitter and Facebook. Those comments will appear on fans’ Twitter and Facebook pages, with links back to the specific moments they selected within the Vault.

“You can share a link to any site with a friend, but here you’re actually sharing a specific moment; it’s at that level of granularity,” Weiner says. “We’re going to be working with the NCAA on their Facebook and Twitter pages, running contests and trivia that are about moments within the Vault. You can have a trivia question that asks who hit a specific game-winning shot, and then the link takes you back to that moment.”

While TEM has done some editorial work within the Vault, Weiner says that the product is really an open book for fans to enter, find the moments that interest them, and share with each other.

Adding Real Value Through API
The front-end Website is important to TEM, but the real value of the Vault lies in its open-application program interface (API). By opening up the API, all of the statistics, searches, and video are open for outside use. With the proper permissions, fans — and media companies — can create March Madness-related applications that integrate the official NCAA video and provide new syndication models and for the NCAA.

“Over time, it’s not about this one site that we built,” Weiner says. “It’s about being able to go to SI, ESPN, USA Today, and anyone else who can get the specs for the API and create a licensing deal with the NCAA. The Web-development team at ESPN or SI can take their own NCAA page and build their own version of this Vault, hooking up our video into their player without having to deal with a video file or do editing.”

Everyone from Web publishers to iPhone-app creators can work through this API to build applications, providing new opportunities for monetization and ad revenue for the NCAA. For this year, however, the Vault is part of the NCAA site and the existing advertising-support model on that site.

“This is something that we see as a leading-edge development in sports-rights development,” Weiner says. “This unlocks the archive and brings it to life. Rather than creating a bunch of DVDs, you bring the content forward, bring it to life, make it very easy to publish and access.”

Diving in Deeper
The next steps for this Vault will be to expand it beyond the Sweet Sixteen round, and beyond the last decade. Additional games will be added to the Vault as soon as this year’s tournament is complete, with more on the horizon.

“We’re talking with the NCAA about expanding this to other sports of theirs as well,” Weiner says.

That means that a NCAA baseball or soccer vault could soon be on the way.

Thirteen of the 22 regular-season baseball games that The Mtn. will offer this season will be produced by the students in the Film/Television/Digital Media department at TCU. Last fall, TCU students successfully produced volleyball, women’s basketball, and men’s basketball games for The Mtn., and, with a few suggestions and one technical upgrade, that partnership will continue through the baseball season.

“We’re taking 13 baseball games that TCU is producing,” says Steve Hurlbut, senior executive producer/director of programming for The Mtn. “We’re not making any major changes to what we’ve done with them in the past, although they have now procured a clock-and-score unit.”

Prior to that acquisition, the TCU students were attempting to run their score bug off a channel of Chyron, which Hurlbut says is “difficult to keep up with, even for a good Chyron operator.” With the clock-and-score unit, the student graphics operator now has the ability to write graphic messaging while keeping viewers informed of the score, inning, and pitch count.

“That’s been their largest technological advancement over the course of the season,” Hurlbut says.

For the most part, The Mtn. leaves the TCU students to their work, trusting the professors in the television and media department to ensure a quality production. The network does, however, periodically provide the students with feedback, as well as supplying them with a customized TCU graphics package consistent with the look on the network.

“I went down and met with their group of producers and directors a few weeks ago,” Hurlbut says. “[Coordinating Producer for Live Events] Brian Mitchell, is down there this week. Because we’re taking the first of their baseball productions, he went down to sit with those guys. He’s going to stick around to speak to a few classes, to give them some pointers.”

In order to smoothly air those baseball games, The Mtn. made an investment at TCU to extend the school’s local area network from its broadcast facility to its sport venues, specifically the baseball field and the Coliseum, where baseball and volleyball are played.

“We put four bonded T1 connections in with Glowpoint and then hooked up Streambox encoders and decoders,” explains Jon Rees, VP of operations for The Mtn. “We’re hauling all of that back. We just did a side-by-side test with a truck, sending the feed up on satellite and back down through the Streambox, and it looked awfully good. We’re really happy with the way that’s working.”

In addition to the TCU contribution to the spring offering, BYU will pitch in with eight baseball telecasts produced by BYU-TV, shown on next-day tape delay.

On the softball side, The Mtn. will air three live and six tape-delayed MWC softball games this year. The tape-delayed games will be produced by BYU-TV and CBS College Sports Network.

The Mtn. will produce live pre- and post-game shows from network studios as part of each baseball and softball telecast. Five of the TCU-produced telecasts will also incorporate a pre-game studio show produced by The Mtn.

On the original-programming side, The Mtn. will produce Reaching the Peak: Destination Omaha featuring a behind-the-scenes look at the TCU baseball program. Additional Web-only clips are available at www.themtn.tv as part of each program.