SUper Sports

Andy Robinson, GM of OTN and Executive Producer for SUper Sports here . . .

Last night the students of Citrus TV produced the UConn/SU women’s volleyball game from Manley Filed House for the first “SUper Sports” production of the fall semester. David Resnick produced and Gordon Brookes directed with Andrew Africk and Jon Erwin offering up the play-by-play and color commentary. Wes Puvis provided the wizardry for the technically flawless show. Oh, and by the way, the SU women won three games to one.

During the morning we lost power at Manley so for much of set-up, Wes and I were working in semi-darkness. Plus we discovered that we were short a couple of long video cables so that the announcers could see the program monitor. So in the afternoon Wes went to class and then headed back to Citrus where he quickly made up a couple of cables and hustled out to Manley. Thanks for that Wes. I was able to cut a meeting short and head back out there to finish the set-up. By 4 o’clock we were technically set . . . or at least we that’s what we thought. That stupid program cable to the announcers booth wasn’t working right. Why do they need to see it anyway? So at 6:30 (game started at 7) we discovered that what we thought was program was actually just the output of the replay machine. Last week I had a freelance engineer do some tweaking to the equipment and both Wes and I were putting the gear through “game conditions” for the first time and we discovered that a cable wasn’t in the right spigot. Wes deftly figured that out and fixed the problem.

So we “did the game.” It’ll air this week on OTN. And even though I’m a little biased, I think the crew did a great job. There are few things more difficult to d than live televised sports; brain surgery comes to mind as something tougher. But seriously, to tell a story, live and on the fly, is tough stuff. But man it’s fun.

I hope you watch.