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Pictured above: The UNM Lobo volleyball athletic communications crew prematch at the Johnson Center: intern Charley Bickel, stats caller Lydia Martinez and athletic communications assistant director Allison Weiss. ?
Sports communciations troubleshooting and problem-solving, LIVE edition
by Frank Mercogliano – University of New Mexico, Assistant AD for Communications @fmmercogliano
In late October, the University of New Mexico was faced with a statistics challenge for a conference volleyball game when their Genius-trained volleyball statistician Charley Bickel came down with Covid. Here’s how the UNM external team came up with the technological solution to have him stat the match from home — and a game management crisis was averted. Here’s a summation of how UNM solved the problem, as written by department leader Frank Mercogliano.
At New Mexico, we are very lucky to have a student communications intern named
Charley Bickel, who is a technology whiz. He is also a statistics guru who took to the NLS Genius software like a duck to water, so when we transitioned from Stat Crew for volleyball to Genius, we handed the reins to Charley, and we have never had to worry about it.
Until Thursday, October 20.
Allison Weiss, our volleyball contact came to me just before our noon press conference on Tuesday, two days before our next home game and just said “So we have an issue for Thursday.” She showed me a text message from Charley. He was down for the count with Covid.
There is no one on staff who has ever run the Genius volleyball program before, and a big conference game with San Diego State was probably not the match to throw in a first-time operator.
The reality is it would have probably been me, as I had to step in and stat the football game at home on Saturday. I’m familiar with the football program, and it’s slower and I can reasonably handle that. I didn’t trust myself for volleyball.
After the press conference, Allison and I were talking, and I sort of flippantly said “you know, he looks down at his computer most of the time anyways … maybe he can stat it from home.” Of course our first concern was the well-being of Charley, who shouldn't have to do this when he's home sick. Plus, there were a lot of reasons why it probably wouldn’t work, so we tried to figure out a different solution.
I contacted a few schools in the state of New Mexico, but let’s face it, we are local to no one. It’s not like North Carolina where there about 50 schools all near each other. I was hopeful perhaps Evan O’Kelly, our newest team member — who was arriving for his new job on volleyball game day — had inputted volleyball before. He was game to try, but like me, had never actually done it.
Fortunately, Charley's case was a mild one and so with few other options, I kept coming back to if he's feeling up to it and wants to try it, why couldn’t Charley do it from home? So instead of reasons why it
wouldn’t work, we came up with ways to make it work, and from that idea in my head, the UNM external team took over.
The table set up in the arena.
Charley put together what we would need to pull this feat off, and equipment-wise it was doable:
Required Hardware/Software:
- Three computers with hardwired internet connections
- One onsite
- Two offsite (one for video feed, one for remote input)
- Video production system capable of sending an NDI feed using NDI bridge
- Two cell phones with wired/wireless headsets for handsfree operation
- Anydesk (remote desktop control software)
Charley and
Chase Christiansen, who is the Assistant AD for Creative Services and who handles all of our livestream production, went to work figuring out how to get a basically real-time feed from the arena to Charley’s house. Chase set him up with an NDI feed utilizing an NDI bridge, which basically means Charley had a closed-circuit clean feed of the main camera that is at center court so he could see the whole court. Chase overlayed that with a score graphic because Charley from home wouldn’t be able to see the scoreboard. Because it’s the closed-circuit NDI feed, the delay was less than half a second, whereas watching the stream is anywhere from 45-55 seconds of delay, which would not work in volleyball.
Here is the volleyball match/statistical setup in Charley Bickell’s room in which he was quarantined at the time of the volleyball match. And yes, those are Star Wars models hanging that he built.
Allison set up the stats computer in the usual spot, which was important because Charley created a program, or as he would say, ‘cooked some code’, so that the livestream could get instantaneous stats from the scoring computer. Charley used a program called
Anydesk to remote into the scoring laptop from a second computer at his house.
Our caller,
Lydia Martinez, was in her normal spot and could monitor the computer to troubleshoot if something happened. She wore earbuds and connected on a phone call back to Charley, who had his gaming headset connected so he could hear and talk without using his hands.
To head off any issues with the coaches, Allison informed both early in the day that we were going to try this remote stat keeping and that if there were issues, we might not have printed stats or stats altogether until we could rewatch the video. Both coaches understood and went their merry way. Being proactive with the coaches was an important part of the process.
From there, it was business as usual. Everything worked. Charley was able to follow along and take Lydia’s calls and input everything. He even was able to fix things on the fly, and he printed remotely at each timeout to the home team locker room printer, which Allison got and distributed.
To any coach, fan watching the stream, or fan following the live stats, it was seamless. They would never have known all the hoops that were jumped to test everything and that Charley the statistician was at home recovering from Covid and inputting the stats from miles away.
The other main component for this system to work is everything must be hard-wired for internet. It cannot be on wireless due to reliability issues and data transfer. The latency introduced at each link in the chain must be as low as possible and the best way to ensure this is to hardwire every internet connection because wireless introduces additional latency, or delay. This will allow your caller and statistician to work together in real time despite being in two different physical locations.
I’m proud of our team taking an admittedly crazy idea and problem solving our way into an unqualified success. It took turning the statement around from “here’s why it won’t work” to “what can we do to make it work,” and we problem-solved our way to a solution that worked for everyone.
From Allison to Chase to Charley, everyone on our team worked hard to make this a reality so that everything went as smooth as possible … and amazingly enough, it did.
Thankfully, Charley, who did a lot of the technical stuff and inputted the game through Covid, will be in the building for the next home game. But if he goes down again, at least we have a solution.
And, just to be safe, we are all going to learn the program!
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