Bay Area schools streaming sports for fans near, far

Coverage puts games on tablets and phones, meets virus distancing rules

Huddled in their cars as night fell on a recent Saturday, dozens of eager parents watched on their phones and tablets as the Dublin High School football team scrimmaged on a field well within their view.

They listened intently as Caede McMahon, a Dublin High senior, called the play-by-play. On the sidelines, two students operated cameras. Two more worked as sideline reporters, interviewing coaches. The broadcast included some impressive graphics, also produced by students.

In normal times, none of this would be necessary, let alone essential. Family and friends would be in the grandstands to watch high school football games. In the time of COVID-19, though, attendance is heavily restricted. If you’re lucky, you get two tickets per game.

Dublin High was made for this moment. Michael D’Ambrosio, a former ESPN producer, is in charge of the school’s video program.

“Nobody was really livestreaming anything at the time,” D’Ambrosio said of Dublin’s early entrance into streaming. “Here we are, a couple years later, when COVID happened, we didn’t have to rush to find a solution because we already had one.”

Other schools have had to get creative in

other ways.

Across the Bay Area and the country, the NFHS Network (of the National Federation of State High School Associations) has made deals with school districts to install camera equipment and provide the ability to broadcast events remotely.

With an automated camera and no commentary necessary, more schools are able to provide streaming access with no personnel required. Schools also get a piece of the network’s revenue,

which comes from the subscription fee required to access the streams.

The NFHS Network said its year-over-year viewership more than doubled this past fall to 2.3 million views during the first four months of the school year.

Other streamers, such as NorCalSportsTV and the Dublin High group, have reported their largest viewership totals ever this season, and that does not account for multiple people in front of a single screen.

Such as the two on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Larry Gonzalez and his wife, Anntonette Capre, have a pair of comfy chairs set up in front of their bigscreen

television.

They typically use it to watch professional sports, but now it serves a greater purpose: watching their grandson, Dublin sophomore Josh Lijesen.

When McMahon gave a shoutout to the broadcast’s most distant viewers, it was enough for Anntonette to jump out of her seat with excitement, Larry said.

“We maybe expected some photographs and (videos) on my phone, but getting it live is just a real thrill,” Gonzalez said. “Being able to see our grandson on TV has put a real light on the darkness that we seem to always be under with

quarantine and the pandemic in general.”

D’Ambrosio, the former ESPN producer, left that job seven years ago to join the football coaching staff at Dublin.

There he helped launch a video program that has boomed from two small classes to 200 students.

Dublin’s first two broadcasts fetched over 3,000 views each; the third — Saturday night, a 28-7 Dublin victory over Granada — was tracking about the same. At NorCalSportsTV, its two marquee football matchups have each pulled in more than 4,000 views, double the average broadcast last season, said Chris

Babcock, who provides play-by-play.

The broadcasts have not only provided otherwise impossible access during the pandemic but also a creative outlet and some sense of normalcy for the students behind the camera.

For McMahon, it was also his only option to see the end of the high-school career of one of his best friends, senior linebacker Ethan Cooper.

“It’s helped me get back to feeling like a real senior and escape the computer,” McMahon said. “Going into it, I didn’t think we were going get a whole lot of viewers. But we called our first

game, and during the game I was just getting text after text after text. … That’s when I knew this was real.”

This Saturday night, McMahon will don his headset again and, along with D’Ambrosio, bring the action home for all the Dublin fans who can’t be in attendance — including the two across the Pacific.

Gonzalez tells his neighbors about how he watches his grandson, “and they go, ‘Wow, is that local?’ I say, no, no, no, not local. It’s in California.

“It’s brought a great deal of hope and light into this otherwise dark time, and we’re finding our way through.”