BY CHRIS TAYLOR | Senior Director | Ball State Sports Link
For the eighth consecutive year, Ball State Sports Link, the nation’s first fully immersive digital sports production program, will again play a role in one of the largest sporting events in the country — the 2018 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship.
After adding NCAA Women’s Final Four social and digital responsibilities in 2016, Sports Link has expanded to include all 65 games of the 2018 NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Championship for the second straight year in 2018 as well.
Starting with the First Four games Tuesday, students will be producing, curating, filtering and responding to content, all while operating an array of social media tools to provide fans the best experience.
All 132 games of both tournaments will be covered by Sports Link students for NCAA #MarchMadness, @ncaawbb and @FinalFour.
In a continuing educational partnership with the NCAA’s digital and social media department, as many as 36 digital sports production students under the direction of Chris Taylor (Senior Director of Digital Sports Production), Alex Kartman, (Director of Digital Sports Production) and Brad Dailey (Assistant Director of Digital Sports Production) will assist in the operation of social media curation, engagement and digital content production.
Kartman, along with junior Connor Nichols (Brownsburg, Ind.) and freshman Zach Roy (Minneapolis, Minn.) will also travel to the NCAA Men’s Final Four in San Antonio to coordinate on-site social content and video production, while Taylor and Dailey will coordinate the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Final Four Social Hub from Muncie.
Junior Adrian Jarding (Carmel, Ind.) and sophomore Quinton Zielke (Waubonsie, Ill.) will work directly with the NCAA staff to coordinate and manage the women’s basketball social content and live content. Jarding will also be on-site at the Women’s Final Four in Columbus, Ohio.
In addition, Alex Thomas (Carmel, Ind.) will be working alongside the NCAA and Turner Sports staff Tuesday through Sunday, during the first and second rounds of the men’s tournament. Thomas will be working from the Turner Sports Studios in Atlanta.
“This important partnership with the NCAA is one which continues to expand each year,” Taylor said. “The countless opportunities our students are provided in the digital space, with now two of the largest brands and sporting events in the nation, are not taken for granted. The fast-paced, quality and deadline-driven work is what employers are looking for. Students leaving Ball State with these skills are highly sought after by employers.”
Ball State’s digital sports production center in the Ball Communications building (BC 216) will transform into the social hub for both tournaments through the National Championship games in April.
The hub will staff students following all 132 games, logging over 300 hours of basketball, producing real-time video highlights and GIFs and programming the social content for in-venue displays at all men’s tournament locations.
Students will be curating tens of millions of tweets and social impressions during the tournaments.
About the NCAA
The NCAA is a diverse association of more than 1,100 member colleges and universities that prioritize academics, well-being and fairness to create greater opportunities for nearly half a million student-athletes each year. The NCAA provides a pathway to higher education and beyond for student-athletes pursuing academic goals and competing in NCAA sports. More than 54,000 student-athletes experience the pinnacle of intercollegiate athletics by competing in NCAA championships each year. Visit ncaa.org and ncaa.com for more details about the Association and the corporate partnerships that support the NCAA and its student-athletes. The NCAA is proud to have AT&T, Capital One and Coca-Cola as official corporate champions and the following elite companies as official corporate partners: Buffalo Wild Wings, Buick, Enterprise, Google Cloud, Infiniti, Intel, Lowe’s, Marriott International, Nabisco, Northwestern Mutual, Pizza Hut, Reese’s, Unilever and Wendy’s.
About Ball State Sports Link
The Department of Telecommunications created a new Digital Sports Production concentration in the existing Digital Production option, joining Digital Audio, Digital Video and Emerging Media. The concentration also has partnership with the School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science through courses in Sport Administration. It also includes courses from the joint Journalism/TCOM News Track. Digital Sports Production offers skills and applications using digital technology to create sports content for distribution across multiple platforms. Emphasis is given to live event production to ESPN platforms and storytelling. Students learn to produce a broad range of content from live remote productions, live-to-tape events, television programs, student-athlete features, Facebook Live shows and social media content creation. Other facets of the program include Sports Link Digital Radio, social media management and analytics, podcasts and the use of mobile technology and interactivity via the web.
