Logan Phillips
Senior Editor
While most Rams fans sat in the stands in New Canaan’s 42-20 rout of the Greenwich Cardinals, those fans sitting at home got to see quite the treat at 7:30 on Nov 5. MSG Varsity, the local high school sports network that has just entered its second year on Cablevision, broadcast the game live at 7:30 across the tri-state area.
Even though MSG Varsity is a high school sports network, the Rams game was broadcasted with the same technology that is usually reserved for professional sports networks like ESPN and Fox Sports. A crew of around 40 worked on the game, using staples of professional broadcasting such as extensive pre-games, live interviews, graphics, replays, and flashes to other games around the league.
This type of treatment is given to every high school football game televised, and to Senior Coordinating Producer Marty Ehrlich that is what makes MSG Varsity so special. Ehlrich previously worked with ESPN and covered the NHL and Tour de France and was recruited by Cabelvision because he “felt that MSG Varsity was an embryonic network that had a ground breaking philosophy.” “It is a 100% focus on the Cablevision consumers, which translates into family and high school students, with the emphasis on students and on the community,” Mr. Ehlrich said. “It’s a network that had a very meaningful philosophy that was new and the resources to rival sports networks like ESPN to college sports.”
Since MSG Varsity was filming the Greenwich game, NCTV could not broadcast their own coverage. However, several students from NCTV were invited to take a tour of MSG’s Truck, equipment and technology. Students were surprised at the sophistication of MSG Varsity’s state of the art technology. Producer of the Ram Review Erica Jensen, who attended the tour was impressed “I definitely was surprised by the tour, because it wasn’t even ESPN, and it was really high tech,” Erica said. “They have a van that does audio, that puts in graphics right away. They had 40 people working, where we normally have at most six-eight people, and that’s being generous. We come in like an hour and a half before the game, where they had come in since like 11 or 12.”
Even though the technology and manpower of MSG Varsity is more advanced and enormous, the broadcasting process is similar to NCTV. Roman Cebulski, TV Broadcasting teacher and NCTV adviser, said he was surprised and reassured. “You know, when you’re producing a game, the concept is the same,” he said. “There’s the pre-production, you got to get there early, you have to plan things out before you get there. And then there’s the set-up of the equipment, and then there’s the during the actual event. It was nice especially for the kids, the students to go around and say this is like what we do, but obviously a much larger scale and there’s more people involved but, you know, we’re doing it the right way. The process is the same. That’s the one thing that I’m hoping students take away.
As a viewer, its not always apparent how much work goes into broadcasting a game. NCTV Art Director senior Nils Anderson, who frequently works in editing and filming football games, explains that the process only begins with the filming. “You have to cutout unnecessary footage, edit audio level,” Nils said. “You have to include credits, you have to do three way color corrects to make sure that everything works. The whole thing could take as long as a week.”
It might take a week or so for a game to air on NCTV, but it is a labor of love for those in the class. “TV broadcasting is an elective that isn’t like any other elective,” Chris Freeman said, the NCTV Station Manager. “It takes a lot of work, and you have to do things that aren’t really fun like filming an event alone, but if you enjoy the process of what we do, your really motivated to get things done. Because of the amount of work, we only have people who are really interested in it.”
Photos by Logan Phillips
