ESPN Navigates Ops Madness for Coast-to-Coast Productions of NCAA Women's Basketball Tourney A trio of production models are deployed to cover 16 opening-round sites By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.
Friday, March 21, 2025 - 2:07 pm
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Few events personify the diversity of ESPN's remote-production methods more than the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament. Each March, ESPN's remote-production operations team is tasked with assembling a jigsaw puzzle of solutions to produce more than 60 games around the country in less than three weeks. It all begins with the First Round for which - unlike with the men's tournament - the sites are not predetermined. The games take place at the home courts of the top four seeds in each regional.
ESPN director Jimmy Platt (center) along with producer Kaitlin Urka (left) during an opening round game at the 2025 NCAA Women's Basketball tournament.
To cover the 16 First Round sites this year, ESPN has deployed a mix of three production models: for A sites, traditional mobile units onsite; for B sites, REMI productions from control rooms at its Bristol, CT, and Charlotte, NC, facilities; and, for C sites, productions handled out of on-campus control rooms at SEC, ACC, and Big 12 schools.
Pulling off this tournament is the ultimate form of teamwork and collaboration, says Catherine Chalfant, manager, remote production operations, ESPN. Our success would not be possible without our partnership with production and the hard work of our functional teams - crewing, mobile units, remote traffic, REMI, our non-traditional-production operations teams, and many others who make this tournament the high-profile event that it is.
All About Preparation: Planning Pays Off for the Ops Team Chalfant, Operations Specialist Brock Wetherbee, Senior Operations Coordinators Abby Hurlbert and David Quintanilla, and Operations Coordinator Renee Greenwood started scenario planning for the tournament in January and gradually built a comprehensive package in the ensuing weeks.
To cover the 16 First Round locations, ESPN has a full mobile unit onsite in four cities, six REMI productions (three out of Bristol control rooms, three out of its Charlotte facility), and six productions out of ACC, SEC, and Big 12 on-campus control rooms.
NEP EN1 is parked at Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, SC, for this afternoon's game between South Carolina and Tennessee Tech.
Making matters even more complex is the fact that Chalfant's team also handles operations for the NIT and supports ESPN's international coverage of the NCAA men's tournament. Thankfully, there were no overlapping sites for the NIT and the women's tourney this year, unlike in multiple cities last March.
We started working with our partners early on to put people and resources on hold so that, when it all hits on Selection Sunday, it's just executing our plan and we're not just figuring it out on the fly, says Chalfant. We don't know where we're going until the very last minute, so preparation is the key. Thankfully, since we had all these pieces in place, Sunday night wasn't that stressful.
ESPN frames BTG Marshall cameras for tomorrow night's Women's Basketball First Round game at the University of Texas at Austin.
In terms of mobile units onsite (for both traditional and REMI productions), ESPN is deploying NEP EN1 (at South Carolina), M14 (UCLA), and NCP10 (USC); F&F GTX 16 (Notre Dame); Game Creek Video Varsity (UConn); LMG MU3 (TCU), MU4 (Ohio State), and MU22 (Texas); and Raycom's HD1 (Oklahoma).
Our mobile-unit group did a great job of working with our vendors to position trucks across the country based on where we expected to need a full truck vs. a REMI, says Chalfant. We also spent a lot of time in the preparation stage evaluating the AP poll and the committee rankings, which helps us project and guesstimate where these resources may go.
Although different levels of equipment are deployed across the 16 opening-round sites, the operations team worked closely with ESPN production leaders - Senior VP Meg Aronowitz, Coordinating Producer Matt Leach, and Senior Director, Production, Integration, and Editorial Graphic Production Kate Leonard - to ensure that the broadcasts maintain the same level of production quality across the board.
Our key goal with production was to keep image quality consistent, says Chalfant. There was no reason that one site should look significantly different from the others, because all these games are equal and of the same value. Even though we are doing 16 sites, we need to give them each the level of coverage they deserve and make them look consistent across the First and Second Rounds. And we carry that same goal on to the regionals but with a beefed-up [camera complement].
In addition to the standard complement of game, tight, slash, and handheld cameras, ESPN will have at least one super-slo-mo on each game and deploy several Fletcher ATR (above the rim) robos and Marshal BTG (below the goal) PTZs across the various sites. In addition, the broadcaster is deploying the Dream Chip Atom One mini PTZ camera (provided by Fletcher), which allows the crew to color-correct the shot and frame up the ref on official replay calls.
Looking Ahead: Big Plans for Regionals and Final Four Sweet 16 and Elite 8 productions will add two super-slo-mos, a mid-court handheld, and a Sony FX6 cine camera to provide a shallow-depth-of-field look. The A game will also feature a Sony HDC-4800 4K super-slo-mo to capture dramatic high-speed shots for director Jimmy Platt. Other key adds include RF boom mics to capture sounds from the huddle, Viz Libero telestration system (operated remotely from Bristol), robust file-transfer capabilities with CMSI, and virtual shot
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
ESPN Navigates Ops Madness for Coast-to-Coast Productions of NCAA Women's Basketball Tourney A trio of production models are deployed to cover 16 opening-round sites By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. 
