One of my goals as sports director is to have as much balance as possible in our coverage of scholastic games on ATVN. It’s always a difficult concept to be fair and have an equal amount of schools represented while also bringing our audience quality games night in and night out. It’s a challenge I have enjoyed when scheduling guests for the last 18 years on our SportsTalk program.
Another objective this season was to showcase more Colonial League teams, as there were times in the past in which we only featured a couple of those schools the entire calendar year.
Unfortunately, this past year was probably the most challenging year — by far — in trying to achieve balance. It became impossible to have a “normal” schedule with constant and, at times, daily changes, altering what might have been some well-thought out plans.
Nevertheless it continues to be a goal of mine for this year and all seasons going forward to work around whatever hurdles may be thrown at us, achieving as balanced a broadcast schedule as possible.
To that end, I want to hold myself accountable and consistently reflect on how many teams we were able to feature while simultaneously giving our general audiences the best games of the night every time our production trucks roll out.
Before we take a look at the numbers heading into the winter postseason, a few notes…
Many schools had just plain bad luck in scheduling games this season and that spilled over to our coverage schedule. For some schools multiple games (and broadcasts) were canceled. We tried very hard to reschedule them on at a future date, if it was possible.
Also, there are always schools that actually prefer not to be on television in a given year. Most programs go through some sort of rebuilding or retooling process and, in the best interest of the students, we may not broadcast a team when / if they’re going through a rough patch or facing other issues that they don’t want enhanced by having their games broadcast.
A few other factors…
Many schools over the last year and a half now choose to play teams outside of our viewing area in various sports. This not only reduces our opportunity to feature teams by half (instead of featuring two teams at once, we can only spotlight one team in our coverage area). Also, exactly half of these games are played a significant distance away from our area, which further complicates scheduling.
Additionally, teams that have great success in a given year will be featured more times than others – due to their playing other competitive schools in our viewing area (m). The fact that playoff-bound teams’ seasons may extend by as much as seven weeks longer than other schools gives them more opportunities to have their games broadcast. To support that point, eight of the first nine schools listed below all qualified for the postseason in football, basketball AND wrestling.
There are numerous other factors that affect and alter our schedule which we won’t mention for now. Instead, let’s add up the numbers for the top eleven schools most often featured in our coverage and see where we are currently heading into the playoffs…with a few months left to go in the scholastic sports year.
Freedom – 10
Nazareth – 10
Parkland – 9
Northampton – 8
Easton – 8
Emmaus – 8
Central Catholic – 8
Bethlehem Catholic – 8
Liberty – 7
Whitehall – 6
William Allen – 5
Additionally, we have been able to broadcast no less than 15 Colonial League football/wrestling/basketball teams so far this year (the reason for the odd number is because Northern Lehigh played a state playoff game against a squad outside our viewing area). We’ll be adding two more of these schools to this category later this week (see the “coming up” listing of district playoff schedules here on our website).
While the numbers are not perfect and we will continue to be as fair to all schools as possible, I do think we did our best balancing competitive games (and constant scheduling changes) with trying to showcase as many teams as we can.
My thanks to the entire Astound TV Network sports staff for not only outstanding quality work but also showing an amazing amount of flexibility in trying to feature as many teams in our coverage area as we possibly could.
Now, it’s time to start our extra busy season with the winter sports district playoffs commencing this week (five high school basketball games, plus the District XI wrestling championships and Lehigh/Lafayette college basketball over the next few days alone!)
Be sure to bookmark and check back to our website for our schedule of winter postseason action over the next month and a half.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RCN or any other agency, organization, employer or company.