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According to the calendar, the Virginia men’s lacrosse team had hosted Army a little more than two weeks before Mike Szlamowicz was interviewed for this article. For Szlamowicz, it felt more like over a year. The discrepancy makes sense when you realize the extra workload Szlamowicz — the director of video service, live events and ACC Network at the University of Virginia — and his team are tasked with in 2021. The extreme has become routine.
“It’s all the spring sports, all the fall sports, and three times the fun,” Szlamowicz, whose Twitter bio says, “Let’s have a good show, everyone,” said with more than a hint of sarcasm. “But it’s all good to be back at work, so we get to do what we love.”
This winter, Szlamowicz’s schedule included 11 UVA men’s basketball games, seven of which were produced in their entirety from the socially distanced control room of Virginia Sports TV and many home offices. But when it comes to creativity and flexibility, few experiences compared to the end-around required to broadcast the Cavaliers’ 14-9 win over the Black Knights on February 14.
The game itself wasn’t even on the schedule the previous weekend. But after a two-week athletics shutdown at the University of Massachusetts scuttled Army’s season opener, Army coach Joe Alberici connected with Virginia’s Lars Tiffany to schedule the program’s first meeting since 1985.
“It was maybe about 3 o’clock, we were texting back and forth, and it looked like it was good,” Alberici told US Lacrosse Magazine contributor Patrick Stevens. “I just called him and said, ‘Lars, this has gone way too smooth. What aren’t we thinking of right now?’”
In this case, it was a snowstorm, the same one which delayed Wagner’s tests from getting to Cambridge in time. The weather system pushed the Cavaliers’ game from Saturday to Sunday and altered the location from Klöckner Stadium to the Lower Turf practice field. That announcement was accompanied by another piece of news: The game would not be streamed.
UVA has fiber locations across campus, or grounds, where underground fiber optic cables run from the control room to all the venues where the university normally broadcasts games. The practice field is not one of those venues.
Szlamowicz got to thinking. Given the location, a typical four-camera broadcast with graphics, or “all that good stuff,” as he called it, was out of the question. But if there was only one camera, maybe they’d have enough fiber cables to connect from another venue to the Lower Turf field.
“We honestly weren’t even sure that we physically had enough cabling or nearby connections that we could even get cameras [feeds] back to the control room at all,” Szlamowicz said.
They gave it a shot. On Sunday morning, one of UVA’s engineers, along with several freelance technicians, ran more than 500 feet of cable daisy-chained together from the field hockey stadium and over its blue AstroTurf to a vantage point for the game camera that Chase Williamson, a freelance videographer and former lacrosse player, manned on a cement walkway atop a 20-foot hill next to the practice field. The angle was a little closer to the playing surface than Szlamowicz would have liked, but under the circumstances, he thought it looked pretty good.
By 10:21 a.m., the Virginia men’s lacrosse Twitter account offered an update. The show would go on.
“Oh hell yeah,” one user commented.
Even after the game, which Jason Patterson called from back in the studio off a monitor, the video department’s work was not done. They found out the field hockey team planned to practice the next day, so they had to pull back all the cables and reroute them around the field to broadcast the UVA women’s lacrosse game against East Carolina on Monday.
“It was certainly an interesting 48 hours,” Szlamowicz said.
“For a while there from March to September, we didn’t have the ability to do what we love to do every day,” he added. “So it’s been a lot of volume, but it’s a good problem to have.”
Army bounced back in spectacular fashion with a 18-10 win over Syracuse. The No. 10 Black Knights have built a 6-3 record and locked up the No. 1 seed in the Patriot League’s North Division.
Symptomatic of a season of fits and starts, Army will conclude its regular season tomorrow against Colgate — a game first scheduled for March 13 but postponed after a positive test amongst West Point’s Tier 1 personnel.
“These days, even practices are gifts,” Alberici said. “It so easily can be taken away.”
Kenny DeJohn and Patrick Stevens contributed to this story.