COMM 3260 Live Sports: ESPN Broadcasts
The Department of Communication’s COMM 3260 Live Sports Production class is a laboratory/experiential learning course designed with the intention of producing live game broadcasts on the ESPN online platform, in-house video board productions in the University of Toledo’s Glass Bowl Stadium and Savage Arena, and additional web live streams of special university events, concerts, and lectures.
Students in this course work as production staff and serve as camera operators, audio
technicians, graphics operators, video replay operators, and production assistants
for events that include (but are not limited to) productions of Toledo men’s & women’s
basketball, women’s softball, and men’s baseball games for the Toledo Athletic Department
that are streamed live online on the ESPN family of networks.
Students who complete this class come away with an unparalleled understanding of live television production and will be uniquely positioned to obtain internships or employment in a multitude of TV production settings.
Students almost unequivocally report that they find it extremely rewarding to be a part of a small team of individuals responsible for the daunting task of putting together a live broadcast with a short amount of preparation and setup, and to be able to send an online link to friends, family, and potential employers and say “I helped make this.”
Typically, ESPN sends in their own professional broadcast crew for football, but our
Live Sports Production team still does a full production for the video board in the
Glass Bowl stadium. To support this, we have a state of the art control room facility
in the Glass Bowl, allowing our production truck to remain at Savage Arena for Volleyball
while we are doing a video board show for football. We also have an additional complete
control room facility at Savage Arena. This allows us to do an entirely separate video
board show for basketball games, tailoring that in-arena show for fan experience,
independent of the broadcast that we’re doing for ESPN out of the production truck.
All of these productions are staffed by students in the Live Sports Production class under the supervision and direction of Department of Communication instructors and Media Services Staff. Since it has no prerequisites, any students, regardless of major, are encouraged to take the Live Sports Production class if they are interested in sports production. Once students have completed the Comm-3260 Live Sports Production class they can earn additional credits toward their degree by taking a Comm-4900 Independent Study in Live Sports Production, or they can apply for a student worker position where they will be hired as a paid student employee to work in more advanced production roles and help train and mentor the newer students.
In addition to their work in sporting events, students will also serve as producton
staff for lectures across various UToledo colleges and departments that are either
streamed live or recorded for archival purposes, productions of concerts put on by
the UToledo Department of Music, and productions of other special events in Savage
Arena, Doermann Theatre, Nitschke Auditorium, and the Student Union.
With the exception of a few group instructional meetings, students do their work outside of the classroom on real production events. Meeting times and locations will vary, but typical crew “call” time will be approximately 2-4 hours prior to the start of the event (call times vary depending on how much setup is necessary, which varies from sport to sport). Other than a few instructional meetings, all of the work for the Comm-3260 class takes place at the production events that the class is responsible for staffing. As a result, the class is treated much like an internship where the student is expected to do 10-12 hours’ work per week for a 3-credit hour class. This equates to around 100 hours over the course of the semester.
The Live Sports Production class provides a one-of-a-kind experience to learn live television production in a real-world environment.
Unlike many of the 11 other Mid-American Conference universities who hire professional contractors to produce content for ESPN, the University of Toledo has made a commitment to students’ learning opportunities by staffing all productions with students.
And since our first ESPN3 broadcast in September 2015, students in the Comm-3260 class have proven that as they learn live television production skills “on-the-job,” they are capable of producing extremely high-quality productions that are even better than those produced by seasoned professionals at other universities.
