iPad above every player’s locker

Beginning Monday, the 123 back-lit nameplates about the lockers of Nebraska’s varsity football players will be replaced with iPads.

From the story on Huskers.com:

Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne admitted Friday that he didn’t know a lot about iPads, “but the main purpose,” he said, “is for communication, so if Bo (Pelini) or an assistant coach needs to schedule a meeting, everybody can know immediately, whether they’re in the varsity locker room or the walk-on locker room at the Hawks Championship Center.

For compliance reasons, the iPads will be mounted into each player’s locker. The football staff will have the ability to send messages to the players via their iPads. The players will be able to acknowledge and respond, but their messages will be limited to football and academic personnel only.

The new capability will enable the football staff to post events to each player’s iPad calendar, so he will know the times of each practice, conditioning session, academic meeting or position meeting, even if it’s called at the last minute.

What about the capability to access all iPads remotely so they can play the same video at once?

“Wireless can cause a slight delay, but yes, that’s the plan – to get all to play at once when the situation calls for it,” said Chad Chiesa, a Nebraska Athletic Department IT specialist. “With the assistance of a software development firm that specializes in mobile device applications, our hope is to keep everything in sync.”

I’m sure the guys in Cupertino didn’t foresee this particular use of the iPad but they knew in their hearts and smart heads that there would be no end of creative uses. Do you think they pull these down and replace them with the new RIM Blackpads? Or Microsoft’s Slate?

via Uber Husker, Todd Perry

Video Affiliate Advisory


I love this idea. The head of affiliate relations for Learfield Sports (Keith Kowalski) posts a brief (60 sec) video, explaining a new text alert service for keeping radio affiliates up to the minute on changes to broadcast times due to weather. Nothing fancy here. Just pointed the Flip camera and popped the advisory up on YouTube. Our sports ops folks are making excellent use of their website (WordPress) which serves 40+ networks.

Verizon, NFL to stream NFL draft, games

From Digital Sports Daily:

The NFL and Verizon wireless have struck a deal to put live games on mobile phones, the Wall Street Journal reports on Tuesday. The two companies will partner in time to stream the NFL draft which begins on April 22, on to mobile devices.

In addition to the NFL draft, Verizon will stream NBC’s Sunday night football, the NFL Network and the Red Zone channel but not games shown on FOX, CBS or ESPN.

The NFL Red Zone channel, which was previously only available on satellite and cable, airs live look-ins of every key play and touchdown from Sunday afternoon games.

Verizon Wireless will pay the NFL $720 million over four-years to be the exclusive mobile home of the NFL. The ability to watch every out-of-market MLB game on iPhone came last summer, making the NFL just the second pro sports league to show pocket sized games.

The games will be available on Verizon’s 3G network so users aren’t required to find a Wi-Fi hotspot to watch games. NFL mobile will then go to 4G network as Verizon replaces its 3G network by from this year to the end of 2013.

A “teaching moment” or Big Brother?

YouDiligence.com is the brain-child of Kevin Long. According to a blog post on ESPNB’s Jock-O-Sphere, the service works like this:

“…for a small fee — $1,250 a year for 50 athletes or less, or $5,000 a year for 500-750 athletes (described as pennies a day for each athlete) — schools are essentially given a broad-scale monitoring system for their athletes’ Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages. Enter in the keywords you’d prefer not to show up in your student-athletes’ stream — these can range from curse words to alcohol and drug references to just about anything; it’s entirely customizable — and the instant any of these buzz words are posted to a student-athletes’ social media stream, administrators can be alerted via e-mail and a detailed account of the instance is added to a spreadsheet log … instead of online a few hours later on a blog or newspaper’s Web site, which could be potentially damaging to the program.”

This is a really interesting post (by Ryan Corazza, a freelance writer and Web designer based in Chicago), whether you’re in the world of college athletics or not. Would you (would I) be okay with your company monitoring what you post on social sites? Are you sure they are not? Would it make a difference in what you post?

Disclosure: At least one of the schools mentioned in the post is a “university partner” of the company I work for, Learfield.

For the record, I don’t see anything wrong with schools keeping an eye on what their student athelets are saying/writing. I mean, it’s out there. You should assume everyone is reading every word you post.

If you feel that your school is censoring your freedom of speech, then it’s decision time.

Jonathan Brownfield: Sports Photographer

Jonathan BrownfieldI don’t remember how I happened across Jonathan Brownfield. One of those six degrees of Twitter things, probably. Jonathan is a professional sports photographer and has shot games involving “our” teams so that was probably it.

Along the way he mentioned visiting family in Missouri over the holidays so I tweeted him with an invite to stop by for lunch/tour/interview.  Today was the day.

Here’s some background from one of Jonathan’s websites (for those that take a pass on the interview):

“While in high school, I started working as an assistant for Sports Illustrated photographer, David Klutho. That marked the beginning of my career as a professional photographer. This lead to having over 20 photos published in Sports Illustrated.

When I started college I began working for the University of Missouri Athletic Department and became their Head of Photography. Besides shooting, I coordinated a group of photographers to make sure every home event was covered.

During my sophomore year I was recruited by Hooters to photograph some of the local girls for the 2008 and 2009 calendars and the 2008 Miss Hooters International Beauty Pageant.

I currently shoot sports for US Presswire.

Now days my work is regularly seen in USA Today, ESPN Magazine, and in the LA Times.”

Did I mention that Jonathan is 23 years old?

I made a list of questions to ask a professional sports photographer only to discover that Jonathan has branched out from that (still a passion but now kind of a weekend thing). I rambled on with my questions so I’ve chopped the visit into two, 20-minutes chunks. The first one is mostly bio and social media. The second finally gets around to some sports stuff.

AUDIO: Interview Part 1

AUDIO: Interview Part 2

I was very impressed with Jonathan. Accomplishing what he has at 23, it would be easy to conclude one’s poop is odorless. He is what your grandmother called “a nice young man.”

You can see some of his photography here. He blogs here. And he’s @johnnybond86 on Twitter.

Drop a text “dime” on the jerk in the row behind you

text250Iowa State and University of Iowa football fans can now text university staff to alert them to problems. Like some drunk ass clown sitting behind you screaming obscenities. Or a lost child or something.

They just punch in 97178, then type the word ALERT, before sending a text message (including your seat location).

Hawkeye officials implemented a new text messaging system before the season, in order to give fans quick and discrete access to ushers as well as security and medical personnel.

The texting program is part of a larger communications agreement with Learfield Sports (company I work for) and FanDriveMedia. Full story here.

The Rev. Knute Rockne will deliver today’s message

This morning I overhead two friends discussing religion. Their “conversation” quickly became tense and strained with one party walking away angry.

Kids, listen to your Uncle Steve. The ONLY safe place to talk about religion is in a big room with a bunch of people who feel exactly the way you do about it.

jesus_footballOrganized religion (a redundancy) is like the NFL. It’s made up leagues (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, etc) and the leagues are made up of teams (Southern Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Sunni, Shia, etc).

Now, the league officials (the Pope and whatever they call the top guys in the other leagues) don’t want you just getting together on a Saturday afternoon, choosing teams and playing touch football for a couple of hours. That might be fun, but you won’t make it to the Big Leagues like that and those pick-up games sure won’ keep the lights on.

You need uniforms, play books, cheer leaders, a band… and officials to blow the whistle when you break the rules.

With verrrryyyy rare exceptions… every “discussion” of religion (and politics, for that matter) is one person validating his or her beliefs by demonstrating that yours are wrong.

Alabama paper launches paid site for Crimson Tide sports

Found this story by Joer Strupp at Editor & Publisher. This strikes me as a very smart move for a newspaper. I can see Alabama fans paying for this kind of niche content.

NEW YORK The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News is the latest to launch a new paid Web site for its newspaper, announcing the creation of a new site devoted to University of Alabama athletics.

The daily paper, owned by The New York Times Company, will charge $10 per month or $59.95 per year for access to the TidesSportsExtra.com site, according to a release. It will be separate from the paper’s main Web page, which remains free.

“The site will offer in-depth coverage of University of Alabama athletics, including specialized blogs, forums, user profiles and video,” an announcement stated.

Added Chris Rattey, the News’ director of new media: “TideSportsExtra provides University of Alabama fans with content they cannot get anywhere else. With photos, blogs, video and extensive coverage, the site will offer an unparalleled fan experience.”

Among the paid-only items on the site will be columnist Cecil Hurt’s new blog, along with his columns and Internet talk show. “In addition to experiencing richer content, Web site users will be able to engage and participate more easily with comments, photos and videos, creating a deeper online community,” the announcement added.

The announcement comes one day after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette launched PG+, a new paid site that offers additional blogging, discussion and community interaction online.

The company I work for has the marketing rights for the University of Alabama.