Sunday, October 25, 2009

Ferrum @ Shenandoah- A New Perspective

With the game over and a victory in the books, I wanted to highlight how I experienced the game this past Saturday night. I, living in Williamsburg, am not able to attend all of the games. I try to get to one or two a year, but even that is sometimes difficult. I usually follow the game on the Internet broadcast. This week was no different, except for the fact that Shenandoah provided a live video link to the game. From beginning to end, live video of the game was broadcast over the Internet. Besides the novelty of getting to see the game in addition to the obviously listening, I was truly impressed with the quality of the broadcast. Last year, Ferrum traveled to Greensboro and the Pride website also provided a video feed. Their broadcast, while new and different to me, was very one dimensional, and really too far away from the field to be able to appreciate exactly what was going on. Signal problems were also frequent, but as this was the first time I had experienced it, so I was very impressed with the efforts.
Saturday night, Shenandoah University's broadcast (SUTV) was professional quality, and had multiple cameras that gave great coverage of the action,. In addition, they had instant replay, two announcers and a person covering the sidelines for injury updates and interviews.
I was very impressed with the entire production, and did some research to see how this came about. This is part of their Mass Communications major at SU. They have a huge list of courses required to get a degree, and their SUTV broadcasts are part of their overall community based television station.
In short, I could not have been more impressed with this as a University based effort. It was done very well, and was enjoyable to watch....especially since Ferrum won! I have no figures, but I bet this is a popular major, and is huge in the recruitment of new students. In my opinion, this is an area that Ferrum could research as a similar course offering, and would probably find a helpful partner in Shenandoah University in this research, and possibly getting this off of the ground.

2 comments:

  1. I think that it would be great for Ferrum to get something like that. It could also be used for baseball and softball games as well. Basketball is possible but due to our small gymnasium I don't know if it would work.

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  2. Thanks Roger-
    I absolutely agree. The offering of this as a major would add a popular course to Ferrum's already diverse curriculum.
    Thanks for reading the blog!

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