Najeh Williams
Contributing Writer
Last semester I started as a student worker at ESU. My job is to record and help produce the sporting events at ESU. This job gave me the opportunity to meet new people and learn about sports I never really knew anything about.
I always thought soccer was a very boring sport, and I still do. It was interesting learning the different rules that soccer had and what it looked like when they got penalties. There was one game where I saw this girl run up and steal the ball from right in front of somebody while it was still in the air. The teams always had different strategies, like there were a couple games where one team kept giving their goalie the ball so they could throw or kick it down the field. I remember seeing one team keep rushing down the field and putting pressure on the other team, and that team had a better goalie, so they weren’t getting scored on much. The men’s soccer teams played more aggressively than the women’s teams. They ran into each other a lot and got more penalties than the women’s teams.
Whenever I had to record soccer games, I had to stand on top of the box area in the football stadium, and it got very cold up there. The inside of the box had air conditioning, which I really only got to experience a little bit of at the beginning of the fall semester when it was still hot outside. There were always two people recording those games, so I wasn’t ever up there alone. I got to talk to some of those people and they were all cool. I think we were all students, but I only saw them at work. I’m pretty sure I met all of the announcers that comment on things during the live streams. Sometimes they shout me out at the end of the games or matches.
A sport that I found out was very similar to soccer is field hockey. They both have corner shots and they do similar things when the get penalties. Their formations when running up and down the field are also very similar, and that’s probably because the fields and goals are set up similarly. It was a lot harder to record field hockey games. I had to follow the ball for both, but the ball in field hockey is small. I had to predict where the ball was going to go before they hit it because it was so fast.
Producing for the live streams of the games was slightly more difficult than recording them. All I had to do was make sure the time was correct, if the sport even ran on a clock, and that I was keeping track of the points. Recently, I had to capture and replay things on the live streams sometimes so the announcers would have something to talk about, or if there was just time to do it. The replays were usually a cool play by ESU or something unexpected that happened that no one was really sure if they know what they saw the first time.
When I had to record and produce the volleyball matches, I learned that some sports do not run on a clock. I played volleyball before in gym class a couple times in high school and I thought that the sport was all just keeping the ball off of the ground. After seeing a few of the matches, it looked a lot more complicated because teams would come with some weird strategies, like hitting the net while serving to slow the ball down and score a point. Another thing that I noticed was that it required a lot of teamwork. They would let each other know who was going for the ball, and they would set up spikes for each other.
The only sport I didn’t have to record with a camera was football. When I was working at the football games, I had to record on a piece of paper who participated in the games. It never felt easy to do that job because the majority of the time the football players were facing the endzones of the field and I had to watch from the box, so I really had to pay attention when a whole group went on or off of the field. It was almost like I was scanning the field every other play for a new number on the field. During the halftime’s, I sometimes had to take the stat’s up to the locker room of the opposing team, which was up the street in Koehler fieldhouse. Most of the time they had sandwiches and drinks in the box, so I could eat lunch in there during halftime, or take some food home after the game.
This semester the events that I went to are swimming and wrestling. I am a wrestler so I know about the sport, but I didn’t they record those matches. My first time at the swimming event I was surprised by how fast they were swimming because I didn’t know people could swim so fast, or even for as long as they were. I saw some people swim over 20 laps in the pool for an event. This job allowed me to meet some cool people and see some new things. I am excited to see what I’ll learn next.
Email Najeh: nwilliams@live.esu.edu
