Wes Akers is a professor of electronic media and broadcasting at Northern Kentucky University.
In fall, Friday nights can only mean one thing: high school football! High school students take the field to represent their schools in the lighted gridiron. These games in the region can be traced back to 1931 at Newport High School and created a long-held tradition to enable families to watch these students play.
At first, these games were played on Friday nights to enable parents who worked during the week the opportunity to watch their children play but has become a cherished tradition here in Northern Kentucky but also across the nation.
At NKU I’ve created an opportunity to continue to expand the opportunity for the community to watch these rivalries. “Friday Football Live” is a livestream show that provides live cut-ins of greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Southeast Indiana high school football games. The show targets fans of tri-state high school football and aims to bring into their viewing spaces the Friday night narratives of our local high school football community.
It is a working laboratory for students to learn all aspects of broadcast television. The show is a 4-hour live TV marathon featuring local high school football telecasts that start every Friday night at 7pm. It concludes with producing a live video stream of iHeart Media’s “High School Football Tonight” radio show on ESPN1530AM and/or FoxSports1360AM. This show produced by WLWT-TV’s digital content partner TriStateFootball.com serves as our post-game show with game analysis and coach’s interviews.
When I started our “Friday Football Live” show four years ago advancements had been made in remote, low-cost streaming production technology. And social media and digital media platforms had made technical upgrades to accommodate more professional level forms of video production. It was also at that time that several high school broadcast media students began livestreaming their sports events.
They were able to provide free game telecasts to their fan bases and anyone else who may have an interest. What was missing in this space was an NFL Redzone type show that could take the fan to the most significant and interesting games of the night during key moments of the action. But doing a live broadcast show takes a lot of people with a lot of specialized skills. But I also realized how educational and rewarding it could be if broadcast students could create such as show. So, in the fall of 2022 we started production, and our experimental learning project began.
Each regular season Friday in the fall the first student crew members on our show who get the show ready are the production and video engineering students. Several hours prior to our show going live, they transform a student lounge into a production studio that they must build from the ground up. This is normal operating procedure for any live event remote production. (Although on a much smaller scale than a typical live network production.)
These students in charge of the technical duties run all the cables, attach all the adaptors, splitters, routers, amplifiers, and monitors. They check our data feeds and the quality of the live streams from all the game sites. They also check to see that our software and hardware are functioning properly.
After this infrastructure is in place, our production students set up and test our cameras, microphones, and other audio and video signals. They then set up the main lights for our talent and set up the lighting apparatus that helps block out unwanted fluctuations of lighting conditions that will drastically change throughout the night in a room that is full of windows.
Once the show goes live our host takes viewers from game to game throughout the night and provides up-to-date context and information that will provide significance, as well as a sense of anticipation for the viewer as they seek understanding of the game action they are about to witness.
It is the behind-the-scenes team of producers and the timing of the director to get from game to game at the precise moment that is the key to the aesthetic mastery of the show. The director visually mixes the show in a live editing fashion that makes all the production elements flow in a natural and unnoticeable way to the audience. The team of producers is responsible for holding the attention of the audience, providing developing information, and generating excitement.
Assistant producers follow individual games and communicate to the lead producer, the director, and the host of the show. They update the progress of games and notify them of when the moment arises to join that game. Maintaining appropriate pacing and delivering breaking news at the right time is a key element to the show. Deciding the precise moment to leave one game and join another needs to be transparent to the viewer. Decisions such as staying for longer with games we know the viewers are most interested in and/or joining close games a little earlier to build up a potential dramatic ending are all considerations.
Another important layer of the production that helps the viewer stay informed with the night’s action is the score ticker graphic that runs along the bottom of the screen with updated game scores from around the tri-state area. The operator seeks out scores from various credible sources and listens to people in the room who shout out score updates from their sources in the field. The operator then inputs that information into the ticker software.
We also have field reporters who give us live reports and shoot broadcast appropriate video highlights throughout the evening. The reporters can contribute game preview standups, halftime reports, interviews with coaches and players and post-game wrap-ups. Reporters cover important games in which we don’t have a game live stream. Or they cover an important game where we want to provide some additional coverage. Achieving all the production goals of the show requires a crew of about 20 people. That crew consists of volunteer Electronic Media and Broadcasting students from Northern Kentucky University, a couple of industry veteran alumni, and other students from local high schools and universities.
The show helps promote local high school student productions and lets viewers learn where they can go to watch those games in their entirety if they so choose. The show also allows NKU students the opportunity to develop skills covering football. A sport our university does not have.
Many of our past crew members have found employment working media production jobs at “Power 4” athletic conference schools with major football programs. They have found work at local broadcast stations shooting high school football and they’ve earned jobs associated with television content for the National Football League. Keep up with rivalries, support students on and off the field by tuning in to our show @FridayFootballLive on YouTube.
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