Young broadcaster will deploy 11-camera complement, At the Line' scorebug feature for tracking free-throw success
The W may be returning for its 30th-anniversary season, but USA Sports will be covering the top-flight women's professional basketball league for the first time. Instead of waiting until the postseason to enhance its coverage, Versant Media's six-month-old network is starting off with a high camera count and an active presence at the arena.
For the vast majority of its first 30 seasons, the WNBA was a league people had to cover, largely based on existing commitments as NBA television partners, says Ted Ballard, coordinating producer and director, USA Sports. In this, our first season of coverage for USA Sports, we can unequivocably say that this is our premiere product and is a league we want to cover.
Intentional Coverage: We're Not Tiptoeing Into This'
Long after debuting in 1997, the WNBA is slowly garnering the media attention and televised broadcasts it deserves. Prior to USA Sports' formal launch last November, the executive team of USA Sports Executive Producer/SVP, Sports Production, Jeff Behnke and President Matt Hong and production personnel like Ballard wanted to pack a punch if the opportunity arose to broadcast these games. As the larger picture became clearer and USA Sports inked an 11-year media-rights deal, the decision was made to have the coverage go all-in from the beginning.
When we considered this endeavor back in July and Jeff brought me on board, says Ballard, our goal was to be great from day one. They have committed the resources to ensuring that we're not tiptoeing into this.
The team immediately hit the drawing board and asked the important questions. If we're being intentional with our coverage, who will call these games? With pregame, halftime, and postgame shows a common aspect of each broadcast, what voices will be featured? For enhanced productions out of the gate, what will be the baseline technologies?
The conversations led to opting for full onsite productions instead of hybrid or fully remote models. Along with a newly created graphics and animation package developed with technologies from AL3, SMT, SportRadar, Chyron, and Vizrt and an original theme song composed by respected New York City musician Bob Burke, USA Sports went for more than the bare minimum on workflows.
Most broadcasts of the WNBA until this point have put out five or six cameras, notes Ballard. We're putting out more cameras than any broadcaster in the regular season. We're doing everything this league deserves and has deserved for a long time. We've assembled a group of amazing people that can support us.
To better understand the lay of the land, Ballard and his staffers made trips to witness productions of high-profile games firsthand. Most notably, they made the trek to the 2025 WNBA Finals in October at Mortgage Matchup Center in Phoenix.
We were able to gain significant understandings from ESPN/Disney about how they approached a WNBA Finals, knowing we would be hosting the majority of the games in our first season in 2026, adds Ballard. We also had time to meet with league broadcast, PR, and operations folks in person to begin furthering those most important relationships.
As 2025 came to a close and the early months of 2026 rolled on without any clear end in sight to an impending work stoppage in the WNBA, USA Sports continued on with the idea that a season would still be played. This meant finding crew for their large number of games; intense site surveys to nine separate arenas, including eight WNBA-specific venues, beginning in mid-January; configuring workflows for editing, archiving, and file transfer over a four-month period with technicians at the Network Operations Center in Englewood Cliffs, NJ and NBC Sports' headquarters in Stamford, CT; and using three days in Chicago and two days in Seattle in mid-April to run through the entire production process offline.
We flushed out file transfer workflows, engineering and transmission set ups, ENCO music services, and any number of graphics and wrap-around issues, says Ballard. These games allowed talent to rehearse as well as gave production teams a chance to practice workflows without the pressure of going to air.
Live at the Venue: Mobile TV Group Trucks, 11 Cameras
To back up this full-court-press approach, USA Sports decided that being onsite was the only way to elevate the coverage. It will broadcast a staggering 48 regular-season games, a number on the higher end of this season's broadcasts amongst the league's current media-rights holders. The strategy will be deployed for the first-round matchups in the WNBA Playoffs and the five games of this year's WNBA Finals.
Mobile units will be the primary source of production, and Mobile TV Group, mobile-units provider for USA Sports' first season of League One Volleyball, will be responsible for the onsite-production infrastructure. This partnership was made possible by making sure that budgets were in check, a process led by CFO Kristin Newkirk and Behnke.
We had to find a mobile-units vendor who was able to deliver the kind of high-quality mobile unit experience we needed at a price that made doing in person productions possible and affordable within our production budget, says Ballard. With its vast experience in set/shoot/strike regional sports, Mobile TV Group provided the perfect solution. A team of our top technical and remote executives actually flew to Denver in August to meet with the owner, Nick Garvin, and the management and operations team at MTVG. We outlined our vision for production and it became quickly apparent that they had the fleet of trucks, engineers and equipment perfectly suited to what we were trying to achieve.
The operation begins wit
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