Hokie ClubBy Jimmy Robertson
BLACKSBURG – Monday marks the day of the final game of Virginia Tech's three-game baseball series with Boston College, and the game may well determine who gets one of the coveted final spots in the upcoming ACC Baseball Championship.
The day also will serve as a milestone for the Virginia Tech Athletics Department. The department's video office – known as HokieVision – plans to produce its first linear broadcast of an athletics event as a test case for the pending launch of the ACC Network in late August. The broadcast can be watched on ESPNU.
Though all of the preparation needed to launch the network is not at the forefront of everyone's mind, Monday night's broadcast certainly ranks front and center among those involved, particularly those who work in the HokieVision office.
"The majority of the equipment – what you need to have for the control rooms to do a broadcast – is all in place," said Brian Walls, assistant athletics director for broadcast and network operations.
The announcement on the forming of the ACC Network came in 2016 when ACC Commissioner John Swofford revealed that the conference and ESPN were partnering to create a linear network. For those unfamiliar with the term "linear," think real-time television programming. To date, the video offices at ACC schools have been focusing on digital programming – the broadcasting of games through ESPN's website and the ESPN app.
Two things served as the impetus for the forming of the ACC Network. Conference and school officials wanted to promote the league to recruits, students and fans. But of more importance, those same officials wanted another potentially large revenue stream to help pay for coaches' salaries, support staff salaries, operational budgets, and new and/or enhanced facilities.
Other Power 5 conferences have experienced recent success with the launch of their own networks. In 2007, the Big Ten partnered with FOX to form the Big Ten Network for those reasons and in 2014, the SEC teamed with ESPN to launch the SEC Network. With institutions in 11 states – which includes roughly half of the nation's population – and with distributors including DirecTV, fios by Verizon, Google Fiber, Hulu, Optimum by Altice, and Playstation Vue, the ACC hopes that similar success follows.
The league left the schools to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of infrastructure and equipment, giving individual school officials the freedom either to meet ESPN's minimum standards for producing a broadcast or to go as big as a school wanted. Jed Castro, Virginia Tech's assistant athletics director for productions and multimedia, and Walls wanted to do this right.
"We heard about the possibility of a network a year or two before they announced it," Walls said. "So we started thinking about space first and looking at different options. As we were constructed, we didn't have the space to bring in the equipment needed to produce a broadcast."
Led by Castro and Walls, and with the support of numerous others, Tech Athletics embarked on what has turned out to be a four-year preparation plan. Castro and Walls restructured the HokieVision office, with Walls handling the network component and Castro continuing to oversee day-to-day operations. They mapped out equipment needs, infrastructure wants, and staffing desires.
Of course, to go big means spending money – a lot of it – with a desire to deliver positive results. Tech AD Whit Babcock, senior associate ADs Brad Wurthman (external operations) and Angie Littlejohn (internal operations) agreed on the need to invest $10 million on network preparations. Wurthman oversees HokieVision, while Littlejohn handles all things related to the ACC Network, and to secure the capital, they worked an arrangement with university leadership to borrow the money.
Eric Frey, the first hire for the new Virginia Tech ACC Network, rejoined the HokieVision team as the senior director of ACC operations, followed shortly after by Sam Jones as the chief engineer. Both of them had Virginia Tech ties, but they landed their current positions because of their work at the University of Arkansas, where they gained experience working with the SEC Network. Both helped Virginia Tech learn lessons from their time with the SEC Network when it came to launching a network, including the benefits of spending money and time on the front end of the launch.
"There were many schools that just did the minimum standards that were required," Frey said. "When they got into it, they found, 'Oh, we need more space, we need more fiber, we need more audio sources, we need more cameras …' So trying to play catch up while keeping everything afloat with the network is difficult. Because of that, I think we've been in a good spot because we've been able to plan ahead. We planned for more rack space, and we bought a lot of cameras. We're not going to be wanting for that for a while."
Tech Athletics invested in both equipment and infrastructure and in construction costs. The equipment included new video switchers, audio mixers, router core, intercoms, cameras, lenses, editing equipment, storage and archiving, lighting and set pieces for the four-set studio to be constructed in the West Side of Lane, broadcast cabling for camera positions, and broadcast booths.
Part of the investment went toward the actual building of two control rooms and offices on the bottom floor of the South End Zone of Lane Stadium, along with the construction of the studio in the West side of Lane Stadium. The South End Zone area now serves as the operational hub for the Hokies' network operations, and money also was spent upgrading HokieVision's control rooms in the Merryman Center, which will continue to be capable of producing digital events from English Field, Tech Softball Park, Thompson Field, Beamer-Lawson Indoor Practice Facility, Cassell Coliseum and board shows from Lane Stadium.
The new equipment enables Tech Athletics to enhance its in-game video board presence at Lane Stadium, Cassell Coliseum, English Field at Union Park and Thompson Field as well. Video board content is an imperative part of the fan experience – something of the utmost importance to Tech officials.
"The challenge we face with this project is that you're trying to accomplish two goals," Walls said. "No. 1, you want to put together a great production broadcast, so that people will continually tune in and watch your games, knowing that Virginia Tech puts on a great production for ESPN on the ACC Network. No. 2, you want to put together a great in-game video board production to enhance the fan experience at games with the hope that your fans will attend more games in the future, knowing that Virginia Tech puts together great in-game entertainment.
"Thankfully, with this project, we are afforded the opportunity to rise to the challenge of accomplishing both goals. We have the opportunity to produce great linear and digital content for ESPN, fulfilling our contractual obligations of the ACC Network agreement. At the same time, we have enhanced our entire operation by addressing our equipment needs and infrastructure, allowing our creative team to tell the story of our student-athletes and teams through higher quality in-venue productions and social media content."
Speaking of people, Tech Athletics also has invested in staffing. In addition to hiring Frey and Jones, Walls and Castro and their search committees have added Ryan Stankard, an ACC Network coordinator; Daniel Gibbons, an ACC Network associate director, and Amanda Rutledge, a former graduate assistant in HokieVision promoted to the role of ACC Network coordinator. Plans call for the hiring of two more positions this summer, giving Tech Athletics six full-time positions devoted to the ACC Network – among the most in the league.
Stankard worked at Texas A&M before coming to Blacksburg, while Gibbons worked at Mercer, but before that had served in a role at Kentucky. So the Hokies' current full-time staff includes four with SEC Network experience and thus they bring an immeasurable amount of experience and expertise in network operations.
"I think staffing is incredibly important," Jones said. "You can't possibly over-estimate how integral that part was and how much time Brian and Jed and Brad all spent making sure that we had the right number of people.
"For a linear show on Monday, we'll have four people who have done linear shows with the SEC Network, which is what the ACC Network is mirroring. Brad and Jed have put a huge emphasis on changing the staffing and layout for the creative side and big-screen side to make sure that the video board shows are as crisp as possible and make sure that we're putting out the best possible stuff that fans can see. I don't think you can over-estimate how powerful staffing is to make sure that the fans see the best of each side of Virginia Tech."
There is another critical part of the staffing piece – the student help. HokieVision enlists more than 60 students annually to fulfill all its tasks, which includes shooting games for broadcasts, working with the production of broadcasts, providing content for video boards and social media, helping with operations and more.
The staff put together an inaugural three-day workshop last August to train students and plan to do so again. They first lay out the expectations and then teach them what they need for them to do.
"Due to their experience, Eric and Sam knew how to teach these students," Walls said. "It boils down to 'this is what we're looking for out of this position.' We are here to put on broadcasts, but also help further educate students."
The HokieVision staff views their relationship with the students and with those running the university's communications department as critical to future successes in the network area. They also hope that the experience gained from working in HokieVision leads to future careers for those students – something many of them have seen in their previous stops.
"It's awesome for them to be able to come in and work on this really high-end equipment – the same equipment being used in TV trucks now," Frey said. "They get to work with ESPN staff regularly when they come in and do multiple linear shows [mainly football and basketball games], so they get to know each other, and they want to use the schools as a pipeline to feed their internship programs and eventual full-time hires for production assistants. It's a good way for them to get real-world, applicable experience that they can put on a demo reel or a resumé that will give them a leg up on the competition."
"A lot of students from other network-ready schools are graduating and moving into very successful careers," Jones added. "They're at the professional level, ESPN level, collegiate athletics level, and many in the private sector. There are lot of students having really good professional careers."
There is work still to be done. Studio sets and a control room in the West side of Lane Stadium need to be constructed in the coming months. Camera platforms need to be built at both English Field and Thompson Field, and a massive re-wiring/fiber project remains at Cassell Coliseum, which figures to be extensive because of the age of the building.
But Monday night, this bunch will be broadcasting a Virginia Tech-Boston College baseball game on an ESPN linear platform (ESPNU) for the first time. They tested their new equipment and their skills during the Hokies' three-game series with Georgia Tech, producing digital broadcasts for all three games.
They have 10 cameras ready to go, with a crew of 23 working the game. They're all anxious and ready for Monday night.
"It's a good measuring stick for how far we've kind of come over the last year, particularly for our students and all the positions that they work," Frey said. "It'll be a good evaluator for how much they've retained and how much they've learned over the past year, and just how ready we are to hit the ground running in the fall when the network actually launches."
The ACC Network officially launches Aug. 22. Virginia Tech Athletics is well on its way toward being ready. For more information about how to get the ACC Network, visit GetACCN.com and follow along on social networks using #WeDoThis.