Since 2009, Ball State’s immersive learning production, Ball State Sports Link, has emerged as a national leader in sports media and production.
Sports Link graduates can be found at ESPN, Turner Sports, Fox Sports, Tupelo Raycom Sports, MLB, Indy Car, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, NHL and NCAA Athletics Departments across the country.
Our Sports Production major, the first four-year academic track in the nation, is within the Department of Media and also includes courses in Sport Administration with the School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science.
Sports Link connects Ball State audiences with the athletics community, delivering exclusive content on far-reaching platforms to showcase the unique moments of Cardinals teams and characters. By doing so, Sports Link strives to enhance the publicity of and showcase accomplishments of all Ball State student-athletes on the field, in the classroom and within the surrounding community.
This unique partnership, envied by athletics departments across the country, 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.
In 2021, Ball State Esports exists in collaboration with Sports Link providing all students with a one-of-a-kind digital Esports experience. Sports Link has a track-record of exceptional student success.
Students gain industry-accepted experience in the following areas:
• Live game, cross-platform productions with the use of Ball State’s 40-foot HD production truck
• Producing content from a centralized, fiber control room for ESPN and other platforms
• Producing content with the use of a Tri-Caster 8000 series
• Originating and producing live content for social media platforms
• Studio show and feature story production and storytelling on multiple platforms
• Post-production, editing and color grading
• Engineering and broadcast operations
• Archiving and logging footage
• Operation of field and live production cameras, mobile production units
• Operation of replay machines (EVS, Dyno and 3Play)
• Operation of broadcast graphic systems (Ross Expression, Chyron, Live Text)
• Non-linear editing with Adobe Premiere or the equivalent
• Building and design of graphics and animations in Adobe Creative Suite
• Cross-platform delivery methods, formats, compression and encoding
• Producing sports content for cross-platforms including broadcast, online, mobile and tablet applications