Inside the Whirlwind Launch of the Professional Women's Hockey League's Broadcast Operations

Inside the Whirlwind Launch of the Professional Women's Hockey League's Broadcast Operations Raycom, Dome get PWHL into the rink in less than half a year By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024 - 3:32 pm

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Launching a brand-new professional sports league in just six months is no easy task. Neither, for that matter, is building its broadcast department in less than half that time. Yet that's exactly what the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) did in the closing months of 2023.

In advance of its inaugural season opener on Jan. 1, the fledgling league worked with Raycom Sports in the U.S. and Dome Productions in Canada to architect an end-to-end broadcast ecosystem that included live production and transmission from six cities across North America, distribution to broadcast partners in both the U.S. and Canada, digital-content creation, and media-archiving capabilities.

In the truck for the league's opening-week productions: (from left) Producer Andy Block; PWHL VP, Media and Innovation, Diane Penny; and Director Tim Deroin

We were building the plane while it was in the air, says PWHL VP, Media and Innovation, Diane Penny, who came aboard in November just weeks before the Jan. 1 opener. It was an all-hands-on-deck effort. Throughout the entire process, [we had] a player-first and fan-first mentality: how can we better serve the players and the fans? We never stop striving to improve on that, and it's only going to continue as we move through this season.

Despite an excruciatingly short timeline, the broadcast-operations effort was ready to go in time for the league's opening games (which were largely sold out and attracted impressive TV viewership in Canada). In addition, the league inked broadcast deals for all 72 PWHL regular-season games to air or stream nationally in Canada with CBC/Radio-Canada, TSN and RDS, and SportsNet, along with deals with RSNs in each of the three U.S. teams' home markets: MSG Networks in New York, NESN in Boston, and Bally Sports North in Minnesota.

Right from the beginning, says Jeremy Langer, special advisor to the PWHL Board, who helped formulate the league's broadcast plans, one thing that the [league] leadership and the players made clear was the importance of professionalism across the board. In terms of the television product, that meant we needed to have a production quality that was [on par] with what our fans would expect from any other major league. We knew we had to be creative to get this done, but we were not willing to compromise on that; professionalism was our guiding principle.

Birth of a New League: How the PWHL Came To Be Langer was brought aboard in early 2023 as a consultant by Mark Walter Group, which was exploring the launch of a new pro women's hockey league and was in talks with the newly formed Professional Women's Hockey Players' Association. He was part of a team that conducted due diligence regarding potential markets, venues, media partners, and other opportunities. He then made recommendations to the Mark Walter Group advisory board, which wanted to ensure that a collective-bargaining agreement was in place with the players before the league moved forward.

Jeremy Langer, a special advisor to the PWHL Board, helped formulate league's broadcast plans.

On June 30, Mark and Kimbra Walter officially announced acquisition of the now-defunct PHF along with plans to form a new women's pro hockey league in its place. The players union ratified the collective-bargaining agreement three days later, and the league that would become the PWHL was off and running.

I had already been laying a lot of the groundwork behind the scenes while the CBA was being negotiated, says Langer, a media consultant who has served as a VP at Tennis Channel and Fox Sports. Once that was completed, we went full tilt into actually building the league.

The Walters and the advisory board (comprising tennis legends Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss, Dodgers President/CEO Stan Kasten, and Dodgers SVP, Business Strategy, Royce Cohen) pegged an ambitious launch date of Jan. 1, 2024 - less than six months away - and Langer and his team began building out broadcast plans in earnest.

The six charter franchises - Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Montreal, New York City, Ottawa, and Toronto - were announced in August, and the league's first draft took place in September in the atrium of the CBC Broadcast Centre in downtown Toronto.

Throughout all this, says Langer, I was making phone calls to folks from my past working in sports media to identify companies that could handle the production side. If we were going to deliver on this promise of professionalism, we needed to have partners who understood the market and could tell us what needed to be done in order to be successful.

After a thorough but rapid evaluation, the PWHL partnered with Raycom Sports for game productions in the three U.S. cities and with Dome Productions for the three in Canada.

In addition to professionalism, says Penny, it was also important that Raycom and Dome were in alignment with our goal of uplifting women and putting the players front and center. Outside of their technical expertise, we also knew that both Raycom and Dome would be allies and support the mission. They're not just contractors; they are authentically invested in the mission of this league, and that shows through the care that they have put into it.

Raycom Handles Stateside Games Plus File-Based Workflows League-Wide Raycom Sports is producing broadcasts in Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York City using a mix of its own trucks and mobile units contracted from Mobile TV Grupo and CSP Mobile Productions.

Raycom Sports engineers Tom Green (left) and Mark

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2024/01/30/inside-the-whirlwind-launch-of-...
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