UEFA Women's Euro 2025: Heather Winn on Splitting the Difference in Sound for the Host Broadcast, BBC Sport

UEFA Women's Euro 2025: Heather Winn on splitting the difference in sound for the host broadcast and BBC Sport By Kevin Emmott

Wednesday, August 13, 2025 - 09:00

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Heather Winn worked on set for BBC Sport in Salford, Manchester, during the Women's Euro quarter finals

At this year's Women's Euros, Heather Winn's job was truly a game of two halves. An experienced sound supervisor and grams operator, Winn is used to splitting her time across a variety of disciplines; one day she can be working with the Three Arrows media team creating a lunchtime story for Cbeebies, and the next she can be mixing an international football match for UEFA.

This summer was a case in point. Spending two weeks on the road to cover the knockout phase of the UEFA 2025 Women's Euro in Switzerland, Winn worked across a variety of Gravity Media trucks for the host broadcast as a sound supervisor; for the finals, she was back in Blighty providing presentation sound assistant duties with the BBC Sport team in Salford.

Two completely different jobs and two completely different environments, this variety is one of the aspects of her job that Winn loves the most. In Switzerland she was on the road in every sense of the word, mixing a 5.1 surround audio feed at five of the tournament's eight Swiss venues. Winn worked across two different trucks covering the Stadion Allmend in Luzern, the Stockhorn Arena in Thun and the Stade de Tourbillon in Sion, and another truck which split its time between Stadion St Jakob in Basel and the Stade de Gen vein Geneva.

Heather Winn, sound supervisor and grams operator, at Salford for BBC Sport during the 2025 Women's Euro quarter finals

Physical practicalities

While Winn acknowledges that there are always technical challenges to overcome on site, it was the physical practicalities and the time on the road which proved more of a challenge.

I've worked on many tournaments on the remote side, and I have worked on many international competitions for individual days, but I had never worked on a competition of that scale over numerous weeks, she says. We were mostly travelling between Luzern, Thun and Sion, but there were also games in Basel and Geneva so there were a few drives over three hours. We did a lot more car miles than I initially anticipated but the travelling team I was paired with made the job very enjoyable.

The main challenge for me was being away from home for longer than I have been used to. I have a very supportive husband and two school-aged children and previously I wouldn't have felt comfortable to leave them for so long; I just needed to feel that the time was right and everything was in place to make sure we were all happy with what was going on.

Winn has been working in audio since 2008, spending four years solely working in studio environments before branching out into outside broadcast in 2012 as part of Salford's BBC Sport audio team for the London 2012 Olympics.

The move from studio to outside broadcasts was quite organic, she says. I'd been doing grams and sound assistant work for OBs whilst I was mixing sports output in the studios; if I was going to mix an outside broadcast I felt it was important to understand the onward output chain, whether that be for Sky, BBC, ITV or a world feed. One of the days on site, I asked about how the Sky mixers formulate their mixes for Dolby Atmos, and it really came from there.

The workflows at the Women's Euros were similar to other competitions that I have worked on, but they were a much more condensed format to what I am used to; the tech requirements were the same, but we had much less time available. I found it challenging to adapt to not having a set up day, but once the competition was up and running and the desks were set to what I wanted, I managed to create mixes that I was happy with.

The biggest challenge for the mix was that each ground sounded completely different, and even when we returned to a ground, we were often in an alternative truck which had different EQ and dynamics requirements. Having two different trucks covering Lucerne, Thun and Sion meant that each had different onsite crews from the previous time we were there, and both trucks had varying capacities.

Production crew group shot at Lucerne, Switzerland, during the 2025 Women's Euro. Heather Winn is in the front row, third from left

Not predictable

Having covered the knockout stages on the ground, Winn returned to the UK and saw the final stages through with the BBC Sport team in Salford. While still working as part of a team to provide live coverage at such an historic tournament, Winn's responsibilities were completely different, both in terms of the environment as well as travel times.

My job for the latter stages of the tournament was significantly different than from that of the group stages, she says. In the final stages I worked as the presentation sound assistant for BBC Sport and my role was purely to ensure the studio presenter and guests were mic'd up and could hear talkback. It's one of the things I love about working in sound. No two days are ever the same and even when you're working on the same production you are meeting different people and nothing is ever predictable.

But whathever the location, and whatever the job required, Winn admits that the call to work on the Women's Euros was a dream job.

Working on the Women's Euros was an honour and a privilege, she says. To be supporting that tournament and watching our country deliver such high quality football is a huge thing to be part of. The production value achieved by the UEFA and technical Gravity Media teams has been, and will continue to be, of the highest quality whether that is for the men's or the women's tournaments.

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LINK:	https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/uefa-womens-euro-2025-heather...
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