St. Joseph’s Athletic Department (Brooklyn) Successfully Completes Live Video Webcast On 1/20/07

Live coverage of Men’s Basketball win vs. Berkeley College highlights history-making event.

SJC's Athletic Director Frank Carbone returned from last year's USCAA National Tournament in Oklahoma determined to accomplish two history making goals for the St. Joseph's College Athletic Department. One was quite obvious: to continue to guide the Brooklyn campus on its way to NCAA membership, but the other was less noticeable, but equally far reaching - to successfully produce a live video webcast over the Internet of a Bears basketball game. Inspired by tiny Rhema Bible Training Institute's live audio coverage of each National Tournament game, which included Carbone and fellow bench assistant Walter Sanchez teaming up to perform play-by-play and color commentary on numerous tournament games, Carbone set out on a personal crusade of his own. "I knew that we could make a live broadcast happen here at St. Joe's," exclaimed Carbone. "Despite the fact that we play our home basketball games off-site at Bishop Loughlin High School, I believed that we had the technical knowledge, ambition and staff expertise to produce this one-of-a-kind feat." And sure enough after months of hard work and testing, this belief became a reality the past Saturday afternoon, as St. Joe's became the first college in the NYC area at any level to independently produce a live, video webcast of a basketball game. The game featured a terrific Hudson Valley Conference match-up between the home-standing St. Joe's Bears vs. the Berkeley College Knights, in which the Bears were victorious by a score of 91-82.

Anchored by his trusty staff, comprised of students, volunteers and part-time workers, Carbone and Sanchez performed the broadcast duties, while Anthony Macapugay (producer and technical support), Anthony Rizzo (sideline reporter), Gracia Gustave (production assistant), Christopher Burke (cameraman) and Wayne Warmbier (statistics) teamed up to complete the history-making broadcast. After weeks of hard work and planning, everyone was thrilled to make this vision become a reality. "I have watched Frank turn Loughlin into Madison Square Garden on numerous occasions," commented Gracia Gustave, who has been involved with the program as a work study student and team manager for the past 2 years, "but now he took it to a new level – it felt like we were at CBS or ESPN !"

While a handful of area schools such as St. John's, NYU and Kings Point provide live audio feeds of their basketball games (either through radio or the internet), St. Joe's becomes the first to actually incorporate video as part of the webcast package. Anthony Macapugay, who produced the broadcast, was the technical mastermind who made it all come together. Macapugay, who serves as the department's Sports Information Coordinator for a few hours each week, used his vast experience as a web manager at UBS to tie all of the nuts and bolts of the operation together. "There is no way that we could have made this a reality without Anthony's knowledge," stated Carbone. "We all sat there with dozens of pieces of sophisticated equipment in front of us and no clue how to piece it all together," added Walter Sanchez, who doubles as the Head Women's Tennis coach, "but Anthony not only made it all work, but he taught us how to do it in the process." Once the production elements were in place, the rest of the operation ran quite smoothly. "We wanted to emulate a real television sports broadcast – including special features, a pre-game show, live in-game statistics…even a sideline reporter," said Carbone, "and this is where the students and volunteers made a huge impact on its overall success ! Ultimately, while we had a great deal of fun putting this together, the real goal is to develop this as an exciting educational opportunity for our current students and more importantly, utilize this as a promotional and recruiting tool for any prospective students interested in St. Joe's as well." Supporting this fact, the webcast created a huge surge of activity on St. Joe's Athletics Website as over 800 hits were recorded on Saturday during the game alone – nearly quadrupling the normal site activity for that same time period. Additionally, over a 3 day span stretching from Saturday through Monday (when the broadcast was archived for viewing), the site enjoyed over 2,000 visits based primarily on interest in viewing the webcast.

Chris Burke, who has been involved in almost every aspect of the St. Joe's experience in his four years, performed the critical camera duties for the broadcast and was impressed with the results. "It was certainly exciting to be a part of the production," added Burke, "I definitely had a great deal of fun and learned a lot as well – I can't wait for the next broadcast !" This sentiment was echoed by Wayne Warmbier, a former player on the Bears who handled the statistical duties for the webcast. "I had a great time throughout the entire process, but the best part of all was that I learned so much about what it takes to produce an event like this – it's something that I will take with me as a tremendous resource after I graduate in June," added Warmbier.

Speaking of the next webcast, stay tuned for Round #2, when we will broadcast the final Men's Home Game of the season on Tuesday, February 6th @ 8:00 p.m.

Special thanks also goes out to Keith Redo (SJC's webmaster), John Flack (Bishop Loughlin's AD) and Brother Phillip Zeller (Loughlin's webmaster) for granting the St. Joe's Athletic Department the proper internet and technological access necessary to allow the broadcast to take place. Kudos to the entire St. Joe's Athletic Department Staff on the tremendous accomplishment !!!

For those of you that missed the live webcast, you can view an archived version of the event here. You can view it either in screen or enlarge the version with Windows Media Player.