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Kickin' Aggies Sports Show debuts By
Matt Stephens LOGAN-- Aggie TV's "Kickin' Aggie Sports Show" aired for the first time Thursday, featuring NCAA sports, intramurals, and the Top of Utah Marathon. "The first show went really well," said Chad Jessop, a senior majoring in communication at USU, and anchor for the show. Jessop was excited to see the show get up and going. Last year he thought that it would be easy to produce a sports show and get some student interest. Jessop approached the communications department with his a proposal and it went from there. Penny Byrne, associate professor and broadcast news coordinator for the Journalism and Communication (JCOM) department , said the show started as a student initiative. Byrne had a number of students approach her and ask for a class in which they could do more sports production. The department was already doing some sports production for Aggie TV, but the students wanted to do a full segment for sports. Byrne said there was enough interest from the students in terms of requests and petitions, so the JCOM department listed the course as a special topic course. Admission was by instructor permission only, to guarantee that students had some experience. "Students were required to have experience so they would not have to begin by showing them which end of the camera to point," Byrne said. "We can start by concentrating on what they are going to do and how they are going to produce it." Byrne said the students spent the first month working on theoretical backgrounds, then working on the format for the show and deciding who would do what in terms of responsibilities. The format of the show contains three segments. The first segment covers primarily the major sports, the second looks at intramurals, and the third covers the types of things that students are involved in including the Top of Utah Marathon, Byrne said. Byrne said the program will be on every other week, alternating weekly with Cache Rendezvous, another student produced show, for six shows over the course of the semester. "If the interest in the show remains high then we will secure an additional hour time slot from Aggie TV and run all the programs every week," Byrne said, "but this is our trial run." Currently, students are putting in about 120 hours to produce the show, but Byrne expects those numbers to drop as the semester progresses. "It is a learning process; it takes a lot longer to produce shows in the beginning then at the end," Byrne said. "By the end the students will be able to produce a show in half as much time or less." "So far there has been lots of interest in the show, and students are assuming that the course is automatically going to be offered," Byrne said. Producing the show is not an easy task, especially in the cramped and overused conditions the students work in. "Some of the problems we are having are equipment pressures," Byrne said. "We added another production but we have not added any another cameras, editing systems, or hours in the editing day. Byrne said students are using the editing equipment all night. Currently there are four editing bays with numerous classes already using them. "Another problem is that a majority of the program is packaging. Packaging is when students take equipment to go shoot a game and interview coaches," Byrne said. "All of that requires cameras and equipment." In addition to the equipment shortage the communications students need at least a two-hour block of time in the studio and control room time. The studio the students use is a classroom with the ceiling tiles removed to make room for more working light. The control room was the previous Aggie ice cream store. "The control room is nice," Byrne said "but the old aggie ice cream freezer is still in there occupying over one-third of the space." Byrne said that there are four or five other programs that the students would like to do but the department just does not have the space or the money. "There are always plans on the horizon for new equipment, but the money bucket is empty," Byrne said.
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