On the Gridiron: Seattle Seahawks Production, Ops Teams Keep Fans at the Heart of Game Day at CenturyLink Field

On the Gridiron: Seattle Seahawks Production, Ops Teams Keep Fans at the Heart of Game Day at CenturyLink Field Known for their volume and support, The 12s' are honored throughout the stadium By Kristian Hernandez, Associate Editor

Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - 2:51 pm

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Many professional sports have opted for a return to play inside a sanitized bubble. Not the NFL. Without skipping a beat, the league is soldiering on with regular-season games in all 30 stadiums across the country. Similar to our At the Ballpark series, On the Gridiron examines the new routines, habits, and production philosophies of in-venue personnel on any given Thursday, Sunday, or Monday.

For any given NFL franchise, fans are always the top priority, but, in the Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Seahawks' fanbase is the difference-maker. Known as The 12s, they use their passion and vocal cords to change the tide of a game. As a blanket of silence sits over CenturyLink Field, production and operations have worked together to develop a plan that still heavily involves the team's followers at the venue.

I'm not sure I'll ever get used to [working in] an empty stadium, says Mike Tremel, director, technical operations, Seattle Seahawks. To me, sports are about the fans, and they are our motivation behind what we do. Operations is trying to keep game day as normal as possible and help facilitate the vision of our production team.

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Love to the 12s: Large Mural Lists Names; Microsoft Teams Offers Interactivity When the organization met to discuss possible ways to integrate these loyal supporters into the game-day experience, they wanted to preserve a home-field advantage.

Names of Seahawks season-ticket holders are displayed on this mural in the hallway under the stadium.

We definitely still hear our fans in the community, says Ryan Madayag, director, game entertainment and special events, fan development, Seattle Seahawks. We've shifted our focus from a content standpoint. So a lot of our hype videos are on our digital platforms now, and our game-day priority is to create that home-field advantage.

The 12s may not be at CenturyLink in person, but technology and traditional artistry are making sure that they are there in spirit. For instance, the corridors leading to the locker room have a personal touch that reminds the players whom they're playing for.

Wide receivers D.K. Metcalf and David Moore interact with fans virtually.

When they park their cars and come into the stadium, he explains, we have this huge mural of a giant 12, and every single season-ticket holder's name is inside it. They know that the 12s have their back because it's one of the first things that they see before entering the locker room.

This year, the Seahawks were expected to use their stainless-steel Seahawks head that players typical run out of. In accordance with field-level restrictions and the fact that no fans would see this structure, the team revised this idea for the tunnel and opted for a different approach.

We designed a giant screen at the end of the tunnel for this program, called the Pregame Huddle, says Madayag. We have fans that are on the Microsoft Teams platform that can see the players come out, and the players are actually interacting with these groups. We had our Crucial Catch game that acknowledges early screening to intercept cancer, so we had cancer survivors and healthcare workers in the audience.

Extra Room: A Storage Closet Becomes a Control-Room Offshoot Across professional sports, in-venue crews are following strict health and safety guidelines to curb the spread of COVID-19. Some have resorted to dispersing crew members into any available space, including empty areas in the press box and offices. The Seahawks are following that route, using three separate parts of their facility, and Tremel and his staff flipped an old storage closet into one of the three current production locations.

The 12s are prominently featured in CenturyLink Field, including this walkway toward the locker room.

It's now a suite next door to our control room, where seven staffers are responsible for doing replay and editing, he says. There's a lot of work that has gone into this to make sure that we can keep this big production going. From what was originally 32 or so people in our main control room, we've cut that number to 16 in that one space. We've also added KVM capacity, [enabling] the people that handle quality control [to] work fr

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