The collective gasp you heard on Monday morning was from our Sports Operations staff in Jefferson City, MO as they came up for air between the two weeks of conference basketball tournaments and the beginning of the post-season men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. Last week our Networks around the country aired 225 broadcasts with 135 of those broadcasts coming out of our Jefferson City studio.
As you’ll be able to see on this video (Tournament Memos), it’s a yearly tradition to put the tournament memos detailing each teams possible broadcast times and dates on our Executive Producers (Keith Sampson) wall. Last week we had so many memos posted that it spanned his entire window offering a wall of tournament possibilities. The process of formulating all of these broadcasts is like a giant jigsaw puzzle as several steps need to be taken to ensure that the broadcasts get on the air, much less achieve the quality that we promise our affiliates. Crew travel, rooms and credentials need to be planned and confirmed, logs need to created, lines need to be ordered, a massive amount of affiliate communication needs to ensue and a littany of other tasks go on behind the scenes to make our broadcasts sound top notch.
Over the past two weeks we have geared up for several men’s and women’s conference tournament games but have also focused our efforts and attention on baseball and hockey broadcasts as well as coaches shows. The fun doesn’t stop there as this coming week we have over forty teams participating in post-season basketball tournaments along with several important baseball and hockey game broadcasts.
Good luck to each team, I’m looking forward to watching the play-in-game tonight as well as some NIT games before the NCAA tournament starts on Thursday. Oddly enough, once college basketball season ends the following day there is a clock in our office that starts counting down to our first college football broadcast of the 2010 season. There is no rest for the weary here at Learfield Sports.