As you may have heard, read, or watched on FOX Sports Net, the NDSU men’s basketball team rocked the house yesterday afternoon, defeating the Colorado State Rams. I’m told it was a good game, but I wouldn’t know…I was too busy working it, as a tape/replay operator for the network telecast. I busted out my 10mm lens and took some fish-eye pics.

Here’s the little truck we used for the event. Cute, isn’t it? It’s amazing how much stuff can be packed into the back of a truck like this. It’s still bigger than the truck that the local stations use for their state coverage. Not that size matters.

This is the front of the truck, where the director and technical director sit with the producer and graphics guy (his arm is on the right). It’s where communications with the network control center is maintained as well. You can’t read the pieces of tape below the monitors in this small pic, but my name is under the bottom row of one of the racks where the monitors for my decks sit.

This was my office for the day, in the middle of the truck. The EVS operator sat to the left, with his equipment in the left rack, and the tape decks were in the other three. I ran the two controllers you see on the left; I could have done it all with the middle one, but since we were running network commercials airing nationwide, I didn’t want to goof up and hit the wrong button. I ran replays off the tape decks using the middle controller, and ran commercial breaks off the right one.

Around the corner from me was this control area, where a guy controls all the cameras. He would ride iris and color correction controls for all cameras on the fly, so the operators simply had to worry about framing their shots. The only things the camera ops need to handle are zoom and focus, because this technician handles all the rest.

The door pointing out the back of the truck leads to this room, where all audio is handled. My buddy Jamie appears in this pic, although I didn’t ask if I could show his face…so I didn’t. He’s on the two-way radio with audio technicians around the basketball floor, as they are placing wired and wireless microphones to capture game noise. They also take care of setting up the headsets for the talent calling the game.

We had a good show. Naturally I caught a wild cold a couple of days before the game, as is customary for me. I cranked the heat in my hotel room and dried out my nose something fierce, then woke up at 4am to chug some Theraflu. That was all it took. I got to work with a great crew of guys and gals. I also got some swag, of course, but didn’t photograph it. I’m grateful every time my phone rings with a job like this, because it’s fun to get paid for what I enjoy doing most. I can’t wait until the next one!