Producing Effective Game Notes for Media and Broadcast

Game notes are an essential part of each of our jobs. Every athletics communications professional is putting out some version of a pre-game release packet before each event, but the reality is that very few people actually put out a document in a useable format that is helpful to all media outlets covering the event, or even useable for the communications professional him/herself.

I have seen 50-page notes packages without one tidbit of useful information or information in a useable format. Here’s the thing communications professionals need to keep in mind: It doesn’t matter how good of a notes package you believe it to be, if it’s not effective in helping media personnel do their jobs, then you might as well not have done it in the first place. It’s your job to promote your program and assist those giving you coverage.

Seek feedback from the media on what things are helpful in your notes and what things are not. Check with your team radio personnel, see what things they like from the notes of opponents you play. Ask your local beat writer and student beat writer what is most important to them.

A television broadcast of your game is always probably going to be the medium that draws the most in-game attention for your program. That is where you are exposing your program to fans and recruits alike. So why wouldn’t you want to make your notes the most usable for television talent? That’s two-plus hours of non-stop promotion of your program. Don’t you want the talent and production crew to have easy-to-use information so that they can talk about all of the things you want to emphasize about your program?

One of the most useful things I find in helping TV talent is to get a DVD of each of your games that is televised. Watch it afterwards from start to finish. Make note of what things from your notes television seems to like to use and what things it seems to never use. Make sure you continue to do the things that you find them using and try to include in your notes things you see on the broadcast and aren’t using. This is critical to successful promotion of your program.

Here’s a few keys to great game notes:

CHARTS CONTROL TV GRAPHICS: Have a lot of charts included in your game notes. All-time career lists, national individual rankings, comparisons from last year to this year, improvements, streaks and trends - all that stuff is clutch. What many athletics communications professionals fail to understand is that charts can directly be translated into TV graphics by the font coordinator. The more useful charts you include in your notes (knowing what TV is looking for), the more opportunity you have as your team’s publicist to control the graphics that appear on your game broadcast. Include all useful charts you can think of. Just because someone could extrapolate the data from the conference release or the NCAA data doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include it in your notes - do the work for them and you will find more graphics to your liking during your game broadcast.

KEY FRONT PAGE: Put the absolute most important information on your front page. I suggest a narrative summary of three or so paragraphs setting the stage for the game - sometimes that is something that radio or TV broadcasters can just lift and use in the opening of their broadcast. Gives you a good opportunity to get your message across in those parts of the broadcast as well. Also, I suggest a “quick notes” section based on easy-to-read and highly useful, yet succinct information. This is the MOST important information about your program. Just think - what are the 8-10 most important things about your team for the upcoming game. Make this very stat heavy and very tightly written - these are the most important points you want to get across or watch for. The writers will also find this helpful, as far as things to focus on for their upcoming stories and it will often tip off a note or a record that might happen during the game.

STREAKS AND TRENDS: Make the majority of your notes about streaks and trends. A wishy-washy and very wordy four-paragraph note about someone’s individual performance in one game alone is absolutely useless. It doesn’t apply to the current game, it doesn’t signify any trend in performance, it doesn’t identify any records and, for all intensive purposes, is absolutely useless. Things that people can watch for: trends of the wins, trends of the losses, consistent improvement, trends over the last five games, game comparisons, statistical streaks your team is on. These are the things that will make broadcasts, these are the things that will prove useful in your post-game notes, these are the things that will most help the writers. If you aren’t doing this, start immediately. This is one of the only things that really matters as far as information is concerned.

GET RID OF THE RECAPS IN THE NOTES: I am a big proponent of the “game recaps” section of notes with complete box scores. I think this is essential in helping media looking back at past games for “last-time” type of things and comparing games during the season. But it needs to be in the back section of your notes and it doesn’t need to show up anywhere else in your main notes section. Recapping games or series in the heart of your notes section is both useless and counterproductive. That’s not what TV or radio talent is looking for, especially if it is in lengthy narrative form. This type of information just bogs down your notes and makes it really hard to find the things you really need during the course of a game or broadcast. This is a huge inconvenience and often makes people stop referencing your notes altogether because it becomes too tiring to sift through all the general recap fluff that is weighing down your primary notes section.

ORGANIZATION IS KEY: Think about being on the air trying to look up something really quick. You also have to keep the TV official stats and talent stats personnel in mind when doing your notes. They are going to be looking things up on the fly during the game, with announcers and producers shouting in their ears the whole time. It has to be easy and quick to find. To intersperse series notes, team notes, individual notes, etc., makes it nearly impossible to find anything quickly. Have an order to the notes - I suggest: game information, series information, team notes, individual notes, team almanac, updated bios, game recaps and statistics. Bullet points and charts are key. The easier something is to read on the fly, the more likely it is to find its way into the broadcast. It needs to be easy to access and succinct. Those lengthy narrative paragraphs that are in so many people’s notes are absolutely useless, especially for broadcast personnel during the game.

BIOS, BIOS, BIOS: I can’t get over the number of people who don’t include updated player bios in their notes. This is essential for broadcast personnel AND, maybe more importantly, it helps you as the SID answer questions that the media has about each player and helps you with your own recap and post-game notes. A good bio has an updated season summary (three-dot data …), a couple of key “what to watch for” bullet points, game-by-game stats, career stats, season highs and career highs. This is essential. Also, make sure the first few lines of the player bio are streaks and trends (how many games they have played in/started, and some information like “ranks third on the team in scoring with 13.4 ppg” that summarizes their contributions to the team. Bios that are only a summary of what has happened every game without any beginning summary of why that player is important to the team and what they are doing this season are much less useful. Also, with the summarizing of each game part of the bio summary, be sure to have the most current game near the top and summarize, in reverse order, back down to the first game of the season.

ROSTER, PRONUNCIATION GUIDE, RADIO/TV CHART: These should be a given as to why they are essential and important, but you’d be surprised looking at some notes.

OFF-THE-COURT/FIELD IDEAS: One of many things I have learned from the great Susan Lax - it’s really important to have a section of off-the-court/field story ideas in your game notes. This is stuff that you can start by pulling information from the player questionnaires at the beginning of the year and add to it as you hear interesting tidbits on the bus, in the airport or when you are talking to players. Talk about how your player is a great chef or loves solving algorithms or comes from a family of 13 people, all of whom played some sport at your school. These always get positive reviews from TV types and are often helpful to writers looking for feature story ideas. These should be organized by player and should be in bulleted form.

UPDATED RECORD BOOK: Essentially, your entire record book should be updated in each set of notes. It sounds exhausting, but it’s really less tiring than having to update the whole thing at the end of the year and trying to go on memory. Plus, it helps you out immensely when answering media questions at games and putting together your post-game notes. If you rely on the media guide records, you have to find where the performance in that game ranks all time, then figure out if any performances from earlier in the season also belong on the list, and then re-organize the entire list. When doing this on deadline or in a pinch, it’s easy to make mistakes. You don’t want that to happen, and, really, you don’t need the extra stress or work that not doing this causes.

Those are just some key pointers, in my opinion, in how to put together really effective game notes that assist members of the media, especially broadcast media, in better covering your team. I think you’ll find that doing these things will result in a better job of getting your messages across.

To Seek a Renaissance

If big-time Division I college athletics is in its Renaissance age, the athletics communications profession has a long way to go. That’s not to say there aren’t Leonardo da Vincis and William Shakespeares among our profession.

In fact there are countless talented athletics communications professionals with great skills who, if put in the right positions and empowered to be their absolute best, could go down as legends in the lore of intercollegiate athletics.

Too often, top athletics communications professionals (not in positions of leadership) are accused of being negative and too quick to complain. While that may be true for some out there, I think what many of those professionals are yearning for is a revolution.

Take the majority of your talented, yet negative athletics communications professionals and empower them. No one in their right mind would do what we do without an incredible passion, but it seems many of us have forgotten our enthusiasm for our chosen profession.

It is a humbling and exciting thought to imagine just what would happen if these skilled communicators were empowered to let their inner light shine and be committed to reforming the profession to bring out the best in everyone involved.

There is nothing more powerful than a large group of individuals who are confident in their strengths, highly skilled in their trades, unwaveringly passionate about their chosen field and dedicated to wake up every day looking to make their profession, themselves and their school the best it can possibly be.

Can you imagine the endless possibility?

But it’s hard. I was having a great conversation with a sports sales representative more than a month ago. I was fascinated in learning about his craft and where it was evolving. He spoke with such passion and was excited about what opportunities lied ahead.

Later into the conversation, he asked - “What are things like in your profession?”

I thought - Wow! I relish the opportunity to talk about the Renaissance I am looking for in the athletics communications profession. I was so excited to be able to share my ideas for reform. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t coming off in a negative tone, so I spoke carefully, as I do when I’m enthusiastically selling my ideas for reform.

“We have a lot of talented people in our field,” I started. “But I think this is a critical time for our profession. We are in need of reform to reverse the growing disenchantment among our professionals and need to find a way to bridge a gap between the ‘new school’ mindset and the ‘old school’ mindset. If we aren’t willing to accept new challenges and solidify our position at the leadership table, with the growing decline of conventional media, our profession could be dying. At the same time, we can‘t get away from the traditional fundamentals and skills on which our success is based.”

I thought - that’s it! I have finally found a way to put together the perfect summary of what needs to happen in our profession and, I was almost inspired by my own words.

Talk about a way to end a conversation.

Change scares people. I knew immediately once I finished saying my piece that the conversation was over. Mine was a call to action and that’s scary to people. Instead of striving to get better, it’s easier to go with the status quo. Even if he thought I was right, it’s too dangerous to make waves.

So, what many people do is not rock the boat. It may be easier in the short term, but it’s devastating in the long run.

At my very first CATSPY Awards at the University of Kentucky, the annual athletics awards show that honors those of most importance in college athletics - the student-athletes, I was an impressionable 19-year-old freshman. In awe of much of the show, I was inspired by the speech given by athletics director Mitch Barnhart at the end of the program.

“There’s no staying the same,” Barnhart told the contingent of student-athletes, coaches, support staff and administrators in attendance. “You’re either getting better or getting worse. There’s no staying the same.”

That stuck with me and, just like many of you, there have been days when I haven’t gotten better. But there are a lot of days I spend trying to get better.

That is exactly what’s happening when we refuse to embrace reform in the athletics communications field. We are refusing to get better and, in the process, we are getting worse.

There is no staying the same.

I’m not saying that I have all the answers. In fact, far from it. One important lesson for any of us to understand is that none of us have a monopoly on wisdom. It does not exist and, while we should always strive to grow, learn and change, we should not strive to monopolize wisdom.

Any mistake I criticize, I openly say that I have made that mistake at some point or another. Sure, I am probably among those listed when negativity among athletics communications is mentioned. But it’s only because people don’t understand the endless possibilities I see in our field and in college athletics as a whole.

I actually consider myself an optimist, who is regularly disappointed because the potential and possibility I see in everything is endless and, almost inevitably, we come up short of that. I can assure you, I am my own worst critic and am harder on myself and my own actions than I am of anyone or anything else.

There is no question I don’t have all the answers. But, what I want to do is discuss the problems. No, not just with the top communicators and not in a formal setting. When we’re honest, we’re all better off down the road, even though it might be hard for some to hear at the time. Let’s get talented communicators together from all levels - I can assure you we would find an answer and a solution to every issue athletics communicators are facing right now.

Why not have an athletics communications Renaissance? Our schools deserve it, our student-athletes deserve it and we ourselves deserve it. If we aren’t the best then we are selling ourselves and everyone else short. Let’s be our absolute best - all at the same time. How awesome would that be?

As Anne Frank wrote “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”

Let’s work collectively on a daily basis to bring out that potential - to truly see how good we can be.

But, in conjunction with that, our environments need to be conducive to that - and that’s why there’s need for reform. Surely with that goal in mind, we can all work together to collectively ensure that we are able to put that potential to work - to let our lights shine.

Here are some starting points for change, for opportunity:

-Convert At-Large members of the CoSIDA Board to Elected Positions - Sure there are a number of talented professionals on our profession’s board of directors, but what incentive is there to effect positive change for the majority of the membership? I want the At-Large Board of Directors members to be able to clearly define their position on issues. What are your key causes? Why do you want to be on the board of directors? What is the change you are looking to effect? Additionally, if these positions are elected, that institutes a system of accountability because, just as quickly as you are elected, if you don’t make progress towards what you have promised, you could easily be defeated in the next election. It’s funny how a little accountability makes things get done faster. Make our leaders accountable. I have aspirations to participate in leadership positions with the CoSIDA board of directors. I want to be held accountable by our constituents. If I am just appointed - then I am representing the membership, but they had no say in electing who represents them. Do you want to be represented in the Senate by someone you didn’t have the opportunity to vote for or against? I think not.

-Increase Professional Development Opportunities - I have mentioned these in previous posts. We are in critical need for an accreditation process. There is no formal education process and, thus, no real way to distinguish a talented communicator from someone off the street. Let’s reward those who have invested the time to improving their skill sets and their careers. I’m not saying every SID out there has to be accredited, but let’s have the process available and reward those who commit to it - higher pay, more impressive professional distinction, more respect, better jobs. It’s a no-brainer. Create an Ohio University-like program for athletics communications. I’ve already detailed the curriculum in an earlier blog post. You have to be a certified athletic trainer and a certified strength coach and a registered nutritionist, but you don’t have to have any designation to be an athletics communications director. Think that’s why we have trouble gaining respect in the overall athletics structure? Hmmmm.

-Measure Monetary Effectiveness - If you look in Sports Business Journal, the majority of its 40 Under 40 award winners are marketing professionals. Wonder why? They can prove their worth to the bottom line of the organization. They brought in this much revenue through corporate sponsorships. A coupon for free tickets they bought in the newspaper resulted in so many fans coming to the game. There’s metrics involved everywhere in marketing. Marketing professionals can easily show how they contribute to the bottom line. As athletics communications professionals, we don’t do that. In fact, many of you might be thinking we can’t do that. Just as a Chief Marketing Officer presents his number figures to the boss, so should the Chief Communications Officer. We should be required to submit similar reports. Let’s employ news-clip services. That cover of Sports Illustrated you got your quarterback on for free - how much would publicity have cost you if you bought the cover of Sports Illustrated to promote your program? That three-hour long college football game broadcast on ESPN where they use your notes to speak positively about your program while the game progresses - how much would it have cost your athletics department for a three-hour advertisement from 7-10 p.m. on ESPN during college football Saturdays? We have to help ourselves by proving our worth to the bottom line. It’s definitely there, but people aren’t seeing it. In fact, we contribute to the bottom line more cheaply than the marketing folks - our publicity is free - we don’t purchase any ads or sell any space.

-End the Rising Disenchantment of Professionals - Let’s talk. Seriously - we need to figure out a way to re-inspire the passion that each of you had when you first began the job. What are the main detractors from your happiness? Does most of it ensue from the fact that you aren’t maximized to your full potential? Let’s figure this out. Forget political correctness - do you want soldiers who sit privately unhappy or do you want a team of people who want to be the best? Let’s all be the best. Let’s end the divisions that exist in our profession, whether that be between administrators/coaches and communicators, senior communicators and junior communicators, or communicators and members of the media. We need to find the answers and reform our industry.

I would love to have your suggestions on what we can do to work on the four issues that I have mentioned, and what other issues exist that need to be addressed. I want each of you out there to seek your full potential and reach it. We can’t do this alone - let’s all work together to try to effect positive change.

What could be more fulfilling and empowering than to reach your full potential on a daily basis? There has been no better time - we have all of the resources, all of the new mediums and all of the new technologies. Let’s all work together to create the athletics communications Renaissance.

Will you join me?