Canes Off and Running with ACCN

By Christy Cabrera Chirinos
HurricaneSports.com

CORAL GABLES, Fla. – After picking up a pair of season-opening wins in Texas last week, the Hurricanes women’s soccer team will take the field Thursday at Cobb Stadium for its home opener against FAU.

Yes, Miami will be looking to open its home schedule with a win. Yes, South Florida bragging rights are at stake. But there’s another reason the match is significant for the Hurricanes.

Thursday night’s match will be the first event Miami produces and broadcasts since last week’s launch of the ACC Network. That’s a moment both the Hurricanes’ video production staff and their colleagues across the ACC have been preparing for for years, in conjunction with ESPN.

The match will be carried online as part of an ACC Network Extra (ACCNX) broadcast, while on cable, the network will carry its first football game, a showdown between defending national champion Clemson and Georgia Tech.

Both broadcasts will make their own impact for the network and across the conference itself.

“As a conference, we’ve been meeting on this for so long, talking about what programming will look like, staffing, and training up our production staff. It’s a pretty big moment for all of us,” said Deputy Director of Athletics Jason Layton. “It’s exciting to see more games out there and this will be just another big part of the launch of the network.”

Across the conference and in Coral Gables, of course, the ACC’s member schools have ramped up their production staffs, equipment and broadcast capabilities to prepare for this month’s network launch.

At Miami – where the Hurricanes have been producing hundreds of digital broadcasts across many sports since the 2014-15 season – those upgrades have meant making sure the video production team can put together linear television broadcasts along with the digital broadcasts that have been available for years.

Additional cameras were purchased. One of the Miami’s two control rooms was retrofitted to handle television broadcasts. More student employees have been recruited and trained to assist with productions and a “bureau room” controlled by ESPN is now online, giving Hurricanes coaches and student-athletes the ability to appear on ACC Network programming without having to leave the Hecht Center. Football head coach Manny Diaz was the first to utilize the room this week, appearing live on ACCN’s “Packer and Durham Show.”

Meanwhile, Assistant Athletic Director for Production Services Drew Thomas and Director of Production Services Anthony Lestochi have spent time training directly with ESPN personnel to make sure they are ready to carry out some of the new responsibilities that have come with the network’s launch.

Sometimes, that’s meant trips to Bristol, Connecticut, and sometimes, that’s meant having network staffers come to Miami, all with the goal of helping the Hurricanes’ staff produce as professional a broadcast as possible, whether it’ll be shown online or on cable.

“I think we have a very solid relationship with ESPN because we’re willing to take the criticism and suggestions they have and see how we can implement them,” Thomas said. “Our colleagues at ESPN send us clips to look at and I enjoy when they send those because I’ll watch to see what other people are doing and see how they do this or that. They’ll also come down a couple of times a year to mentor us and have given us an idea of what we were going to be in for with the broadcasts and I think it’s a testament to our staff that we’re willing to take constructive criticism and really learn how to do it.”

For Thomas, getting Miami ready to join the ACC Network has been a journey itself.

A former video staffer for the Hurricanes’ women’s basketball team, Thomas transitioned into his new role in 2015 as Miami began producing more digital game broadcasts online.

During his first year on the job, there were no online productions of UM games. By his second year, the Hurricanes had produced 110 broadcasts, a number then that was double what most schools in the ACC were producing at the time.

“We’ve been kind of chugging along ever since,” Thomas said.

Now, while those online productions will continue, Miami is set to add cable television broadcasts, the first coming on Sept. 29 when the women’s soccer team hosts Pittsburgh.

By the end of the 2019-20 season, Thomas expects his department will produce at least 15 linear events that will air on the ACC Network in addition to an estimated 80 digital productions, with other broadcasts potentially being carried on either ESPN2 or ESPNU.

Digital broadcasts will continue, though they’ll now only be available to ACC Network subscribers. And as the network’s footprint increases, that will only mean more exposure and more opportunities for Hurricanes student-athletes all across campus.