Lights, camera, sports: Student athletics productions put learners at the center of the action

Any Marquette women's soccer fan who tuned into the ESPN+ broadcast of the team's 3-1 victory over St. John's would have no reason to suspect anything other than a typical broadcast. The ESPN+ logo sits in the corner of the screen, much as it would on any of the other streaming platform's offerings. The score and time are displayed prominently. There are replays, announcers, multiple camera angles - all the bells and whistles that fans have come to expect.

However, behind the scenes, there's one major difference: just about everyone working on the production team is a college student.

"This is the first time we're really taking students to that ESPN-quality level, which is amazing," says Kevin O'Connor, an instructor of practice and one of the leaders of Marquette's student sports production effort. "It's such a selling point for our sports communication and digital media programs."

O'Connor oversees a staff of nearly 30 camera operators, switchers, replay operators, graphics coordinators and technical directors who make Marquette sporting events come to life. This group of students are scheduled to produce approximately 60 athletics events this year between soccer, volleyball, lacrosse and even basketball. Every student who works for O'Connor is paid and gets to add "ESPN" to their resumes.

"I don't expect perfection; people are going to make mistakes. How you respond to them is really what determines whether you're going to have an amazing show."

The student sports productions are a boon to go-getters like Caralyn Whalen, a junior in the Diederich College of Communication. Originally interested in nursing, Whalen switched to public relations and digital media after touring Johnston Hall with her parents as a high school senior. She initially helped on the sports productions to get a little extra spending money. It became a passion project.

"I'm starting to be more comfortable exploring and getting creative with my work," Whalen says. "I really liked how we could make this our own. The longer you do this, the more you start to see the possibilities."

Pulling off a quality live sports production is neither quick nor easy. Students show up to either Valley Fields or the Al McGuire Center roughly four to five hours prior to the start of a game to prepare. Wires need to be laid, monitors must be plugged in, cameras and tripods have to be set up around the playing field. Depending on how equipment-intensive a particular broadcast is, the production crew might stay up to four hours after the game putting everything away.

"There is very rarely a day where everything works perfectly," says Hunter Tempel, a sophomore studying digital media. "We have to constantly troubleshoot things that aren't functioning the way they're supposed to and that's great experience for us."

The broadcasts can be dizzyingly complex to the uninitiated. The biggest ones can involve as many as six 4K-capable broadcast cameras with lenses that cost more than $10,000 attached, an industry-standard camera switcher, a full graphics package run on the same software that TV networks use and hundreds of feet of cable connecting them all. Tempel and Whalen can frequently be seen jogging out of the control room, headsets on, talking to a camera operator on the field through the microphone while they help another one in the mezzanine plug in the correct cords.

While technical proficiency is important, there's something else even more vital that O'Connor hopes students learn: how to fail properly.

"Kids aren't allowed to fail enough these days," O'Connor says. "Parents don't let kids fail. I think this is a perfect venue for them to learn that things aren't going to go 100 percent correctly and that's OK. I don't expect perfection; people are going to make mistakes. How you respond to them is really what determines whether you're going to have an amazing show."

"When I came to Marquette, I knew absolutely nothing, and I was in classes with people who already had their own cameras and Adobe subscriptions," Whalen adds. "I didn't know anything about white balance or iris or anything else. I put myself out there and I don't do that very often."

Live sports productions are also a crash course in interpersonal skills. Working side by side for hours in a high-pressure environment can lead to conflict; part of a successful production is learning how to deal with it in a healthy way.

It helps that O'Connor is a licensed therapist, a career change he made after a multi-decade career in live event production. He prioritizes not adding stress to the task, standing back when he can and offering calm, level-headed advice when he feels the students need it.

"If there's ever conflict, we take people aside and resolve it as a small group; we never call anyone out," Tempel says. "Our crew is fantastic. I have nothing but great things to say about all of them."

So far, the group has received similarly high praise from the BIG EAST Conference, which issues reports to each on-site broadcast crew after each game. The conference noted just one significant issue in the team's first broadcast of the year and none in any games after that. Marquette Athletics has provided similarly positive feedback.

These plaudits might pave the way to bigger things: the rights to broadcast other Marquette sports, such as track and field or tennis, as is the potential addition of student play-by-play crews. Soon, there might be a day when every Marquette sporting event on ESPN+ is fully student-produced and broadcast.

"It's a way for us to not just bolster Marquette Athletics, but to build the industry from the bottom up," says O'Connor.