Week 8 Home Team Friday Recap ---The Show That Barely Made It!

Due to technical difficulties, this blog entry will include technical difficulties!  Week 8’s Home Team Friday show was the most challenging in my 17 year career at NEWS 25!  A cascade of problems happened to put our football show in serious jeopardy!  So much so, I thought I was going to go out on the set and say, “Tonight’s edition of NEWS 25 Home Team Friday Live will not be seen tonight, instead enjoy this rerun of Three’s Company.  We’ll see you next week!”

Before I get to the entire behind the scenes chaos, let’s talk some pigskin…We had an astounding 15 games on the show!  That is an HTF record!

I begin with a salute to the good people of the EVSC for getting the three city stadiums in such great shape.  Paul Neidig and Dr. Vince Bertram and others deserve a lot of credit for the upgrades to Reitz Bowl, Enlow Field and Central Stadium.  Even with rain blowing sideways, and flash flooding the day before, the fields were in outstanding shape.  I took this picture of Enlow with my iphone. 

There weren’t a lot of intriguing matchups in Week 8.  Many of the games seemed lopsided on paper, and that’s how they came out.  The best one was by far was our HTF Showdown: South Spencer at Boonville.  I picked the Pioneers in this one.  It was no slight to the Rebels; it was because of Mother Nature.  I have seen the Pioneers lethal ground game, and I knew the muddy conditions would favor Boonville. 

South Spencer head coach Bruce Green told us two days prior that he was worried that the slop would hurt his passing game.  Boonville’s Kyle Whitten is such a bruising tailback.  He already has 13 touchdowns this season.  The other W in the backfield can also pick up the tough yards.  Jacob Winsett is averaging nearly 5 yards a carry. 

I just think it is great to see Boonville and South Spencer having so much success.   It has been nice this year to talk about different schools.  The Pioneers and Rebels have given their fans a banner year, and it is not over yet.  One more note on Boonville, congrats to receiver Ridge Green for winning the play of the night.

At the Bowl, Reitz jumped out quickly on Bosse.  A new Panther made the highlights.  Hamilton Carr put on some sweet moves.  Carr even had a nice interception.  He was mistakenly put on my shot sheet a third time for a catch down to the ten.  That was Jeff Hudson.  I should’ve known better.  I didn’t catch that mistake until after the show.  I loved the highlight that the Blaine Train got of Morgan Jones’ touchdown.  Blaine couldn’t have been much closer.  Blaine will have the Reitz/Mater Dei duties on Friday.  There is not much better in our area than being at the Bowl for the Westside Rivalry.

 The Panthers have beaten every team by double digits.  I talked with head coach Tony Lewis briefly tonight, and we went out to practice on Monday.  Lewis is always looking to improve, but he has to be happy with the way his team continues to peak towards the end of the season.  Safety Eric Bryant told us that the defense was disappointed how they finished the Bosse game.  However, credit the Dogs for putting up 27 points on the Reitz defense.  That is by far the most the Panthers have given up. (Panthers are giving up only 8.8 ppg)  Bosse has a great chance to pick up a win this week against Harrison.  I will be at Enlow covering that game.

Speaking of the Panthers defense, I put up their story on our website on Monday on the D.  I am at the mercy of this web program to find a nice screen capture to use for the video player.  I thought this one came out pretty well.  Feel free to save it to your computer.

 I had my best night shooting of the season.  Even though I wasn’t dressed for the miserable sideways rain, I enjoyed myself at Enlow Field.  As I have said before, I really like covering the Tigers.  Their offense is so much fun to watch.  However, almost none of it even made the air because of some bizarre behavior by a referee. 

For some reason, this young referee that was working on the Tigers sideline felt the need to constantly get in front of the cameras.  I was down there with my buddy Bo McFall from channel 14, and a courier/press still photographer.  This ref kept running right in front of lens during plays.  Now you can imagine between just the 3 of us, there is a ton of space on the football field.  However, this ref just made it his mission to make our jobs difficult.  In my whole career, I have never had that happen.  My solution was to just go to the back of the endzone and shoot back there.  Ironically, the back judge back there was super nice.  We talked several time between plays. 

I like shooting in the back of the endzone anyhow with Memorial.  Quarterback Grant Gribbins can throw to any section of the field at any time.  Being in the back gives me more flexibility in getting the best shot.  The Tigers scored 4 times against Harrison in the first half.  I almost left after the third score, but stuck it out trying to get greedy for another great highlight.  I am glad I did.  I got a beautiful shot of Jonathon Wandling diving for the touchdown catch.  The Tigers are going to be a force in 3A.  They are really playing well.

How about Forest Park?  The Rangers continue to impress.  In just year two, they nearly beat South Spencer and Heritage Hills.  The Rangers took the lead on the Patriots with just 3 minutes left in the game, but the Pats came up clutch with a kickoff return for a touchdown to hold on for the 21-16 victory.

I have gone to so many practices at so many different schools over the years.  No one and I mean no one works on special teams more than Bob Clayton at Heritage Hills.  How many big games have the Patriots been in where they return a punt or kick for a touchdown, or block a kick?  All of that work paid off against Forest Park last week. 

Heritage Hills is 7-1 and will take on South Spencer this Friday.  That is our HTF Showdown game.  The Rebels have not beaten the Patriots since 1991.  It should be an insane atmosphere in Reo, and a great game.

David Heckard made the trek way up north for three games.  He told me Jasper looked sloppy against Washington.  However, the Cats still won easily 35-12.  I am so glad to see quarterback Austin Ahrens on the field.  He was banged up at Mt. Carmel last week.  I was told Austin played with a brace on his knee.  He is a tough kid that is leading his team to a perfect season.  They will look to finish 9-0 at home against Mt. Vernon.

Heckard has been begging me every week to cover North Daviess.  They are on the outer fringe of our viewing area, but I thought why not!  Let’s go to Cougar Country!  There were some hilarious muddy highlights in that game.  That play where they gang tackled the guy in the mud puddle was fantastic!

He also shot the Gibson Southern 17-14 win over Tell City.  The Titans Josh Wildman made an awesome interception on a tipped pass.  It was second in our Play of the Night voting.  I loved the play.  Great concentration by Josh in the mud!

Mt. Vernon is now 5-3 after beating Princeton.  The Wildcats had two safeties!  That is pretty unusual for that to happen.  The Cats got a tough draw in the sectional to play at Memorial.  That means the next two weeks Mt. Vernon is at Jasper and at Memorial. Yikes!

Just up the road, North Posey also won.  The Vikings defeated Tecumseh.  Joe Gengelbach’s team will host Southridge in the first round in 2A.  The Vikes end the season at Pike Central.

Let’s head across the Ohio River.  Owensboro struggled with Apollo a little more than I thought.  The Devils led 16-0 at halftime, and that was all they would score.  The Eagles mustered a touchdown in the second half for the final of 16-7.  The Devils have Hop Town at home Friday.

Earlier this year I talked about unfortunate times when we shoot a game and while we were there we get highlights of just one team, then the other team comes back to win.  It happened to me when North played Henderson in week two.  Well it happened to Corey Allan on Friday in Hancock County.  We were told by Hancock County earlier in the day that the game was going to start at 7pm.  Corey had to shoot that game, and get back for Owensboro/Apollo.  Well the game started at 7:30 which put him behind the 8-ball right away. 

Owensboro Catholic had some night highlights and scored, and Corey had to get out of there to get to Apollo in time.  Well the Hornets came back to win, and Corey had no highlights of Hancock County.  I knew that was going to be a problem, and if you listened to me on the air, you could hear me talk up Hancock County and how much I loved the Hornets run to State in 1999.  Well that didn’t matter to one Hornets fan who just lit into me in an email.  It’s amazing how mean and rude people can be.  Do people really think I am out to get a certain team?!  We travel the tri-state and get 15 games and still people aren’t happy.  Oh well, I guess that is a good thing.  We have created a product that people expect a lot from.  I really should post the email.  I think many of you would be in disbelief.  Maybe I will another time.

Speaking of horrible luck, we went all the way to McLean County for the Cougars game against Muhlenberg County.  Spencer Phillips of the Cougars rushed for an amazing 401 yards and 6 touchdowns!!!  Somehow, someway that I can’t even begin to explain, our photographer didn’t have a single highlight from him!  I apologize to all of the Cougar fans and to the Phillips family!  What a special night for Spencer.  I have tried to mention it on the air a lot to make sure he gets the credit he deserves!  Way to go Spencer!

Back to Home Team Friday headquarters.  It is about 8:30pm and I just finished editing my highlights from the Memorial game.  I was pretty worried all night of how we were going to pull off 15 sets of highlights and a 3 minute Jay Cutler feature in one show. 

The first sign of trouble was our website.  We have the most frustrating company called World Now that runs our NEWS 25 website.  As a matter of fact, they run most of all TV stations in the country including channel 14.  For some reason World Now is testing some new programs and our station’s site is being used as a beta version.  Well, we have had one problem after another.  It is so frustrating, because there is nothing we can do about it.  Our entire scoreboard was messed up.  It took until around 9:15pm before it started working correctly.  We take a lot of pride keeping the scoreboard as live as possible.  I cannot express how angry we all were at World Now for the problems.

Despite that, things are going smoothly.  All nine of our photographers, and everyone else knew we were on a tight timeline, and everyone was ahead of schedule and doing a great job.  We get all the way to about 10:10pm…25 minutes before our show.  All hell breaks loose.

We do not have tapes anymore that run in our shows.  Our cameras record onto disks and those disks are put in a computer to edit.  Then all of the clips are sent to a main server to be played during the football show.  As I am editing the Jasper game, I hear some screaming from the control room.  Our 10pm newscast is on the air, and our entire server has crashed.  That means no video.  None!! 

I always say you have to be at your best when things are at the worst.  I am trying to stay calm and figure out a solution.  An editor grabs a bunch of old tapes and starts recording the video out of the edit bays to tapes.  The problem with that is for last week’s HTF show we had 25 clips!  There is no way on earth he could possibly dub down 25 different sets of video in such a short amount of time.

Meanwhile, engineers are scrambling to try and get the server fixed.  Jennifer Cahill is currently anchoring an entire newscast live without any video!  It is pretty much mass chaos.  Not to mention, we still have a lot to get done before HTF starts.  Our producer Jason is still gathering scores, and there are still 4-5 games that haven’t been edited.

I start thinking…how am I going to do a football highlights show without video?!!?!  Not to mention I had been hyping up all week that we were going to have a record 15 games on the show.  I could see it now, “Welcome to Home Team Friday, we were going to have 15 games, instead here is a dry wipe board, and I will draw some pictures.”

Here comes an editor running down the hallway…”The sever is fixed!”  Thank goodness!  It is now about 10:25pm.  We have to regroup and make sure all 25 clips get finished and are sent in the right order so nothing gets messed up on the air.  I finally take a breath when I hear: both editing laptops at the Showdown Live site have crashed!  Are you kidding?!  Randall and Aaron are at the live truck in Boonville.  They of course have Randall’s Showdown game between the Pioneers and Rebels to feed back to the station.  Aaron also has the Southridge and Heritage Hills games to feed back.  Those are 3 important games that might now be lost. 

I slam together some final highlights, and furiously look at rosters to write down shot sheets.  10:30pm now.  One of the laptops is up and running and they are feeding back all of the highlights back to the station.  I still have no shot sheets from Aaron’s two games.  He calls me and reads them as fast as possible over the phone.  I am just scribbling furiously on my scripts.

10:32pm, I write down all of my final scores that I didn’t already have, and look to see what clips are still not finished.  There are still around 7 clips that haven’t been sent to the server.  Panic is setting in.  Erica is our first year editor.  She has done just an amazing job.  She is in charge ever piece of video that goes on the air.  She tells me, she’ll have it all done, and that is good enough for me. 

10:34pm, I am mic’d up and trying to get into show mode.  Once the show starts, I have little time to go over anything and make any changes, so I am trying to go over any last second items in my head. 

10:35pm, HTF open is airing, deep breath…and GO!

I try to do my best to always thank the HTF staff.  So many people that you never see on the air are responsible for such a great product.  Because you see my big head on TV, I get the credit.  I am here to tell you, there are no better people in any station that go the extra mile like the HTF staff.  We are TV market size 101 in the country.  I guarantee you; we could hold our own with anyone.

I sincerely thank every one of them for jumping in and doing what they could to make it all come together.

I am betting that as you watched last Friday, you had no idea that we were on the brink of disaster.  I hope we never have to go through anything like that again!  Here is to a nice peaceful Week 9 show!  We’ll see y’all at 10:35pm on Friday, and not a minute before!

Comments

[Pantherfan83]

A big thank you to the entire HTF staff. Our DVR is set to tape each episode just in case we're not home to see it. Your efforts are very much appreciated.

[Lance Wilkerson]

Thank you for the kind comment!

[Erica Combs]

Last week was insane! We have the best team ever! Even though we pulled it off I never want to go through that again! Hopefully this will be a little calmer week!

[Evad]

Awesome job to you all on last weeks broadcast. You really couldn't tell that any of that stuff had happened. I also want to add that I really enjoy the energy and excitement Lance brings to the Highlights.

Thanks for a great show.

[Lance Wilkerson]

Thanks! Very nice of ya.