Chris Strauss of USA Today has an interesting piece about attending broadcast school at NFL Films.
Strauss writes:
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. – It’s the first day of mandatory minicamp for many pro football teams, but six NFL veterans are indoors working on a totally different type of conditioning drill. Rather than running sprints or participating in 7-on-7′s, each member of the group, which includes retirees Sage Rosenfels, Brendon Ayanbadejo and Antonio Garay, free agents Deion Branch and Brady Quinn and Detroit Lions quarterback Dan Orlovsky, is seated alongside each other in a converted kitchen at NFL Films’ South Jersey headquarters. With their large frames squeezed into medium-sized chairs, the players are instructed by vocal coach Arthur Joseph to “get back in stature” before cradling their right hands around their necks.
Each guy moves his left hand up to his face and jams two fingers into his mouth. In unison, they all bellow out the word “hat,” letting the obstructed middle letter hang in the air for six long seconds. The “vocal yoga” exercise is just one element of Joseph’s “Your Studio Voice” class at the NFL Broadcast Boot Camp, a program sponsored by the league’s Player Engagement office which completed its eighth annual edition last week.
The four-day curriculum gives participants a crash course in how to break into broadcasting, with panels and classes on subjects like show preparation, radio game coverage, the television studio show, interview technique and even tape study.
“One of the biggest misnomers that people have is that [broadcasting] is going to be easy,” ESPN senior coordinating producer of NFL studio production Seth Markman tells a packed conference room last Tuesday morning, the first of two 12-hour days.
“It’s not. I promise you it’s not. Everybody’s mentioning how much work you guys have put in to get to this level of play. It’s the same thing. It’s preparation. It’s reading. It’s watching the film.”
Brady Quinn? Wasn’t he the original Johnny Manziel for Cleveland.
Strauss writes:
The experience is often worth the wait. By the time they wrap up on Thursday, each of the 24 attendees will have participated in a mock studio show, interviewed each other live on SiriusXM NFL Radio, written and read scripts for a teleprompter and done standup segments from a local Sports Authority store.
All of these activities are overseen by top executives, producers and announcers from ESPN, FOX, NFL Network and more, with network studio hosts James Brown and Curt Menefee working with the players in the studio and ESPN’s Ron Jaworski helping them explain how to break down game film for mass audiences.
“This group seemed to be very aware of football on television,” Jaworski told For The Win. “I got the sense that these guys are really interested in making it a career. They aren’t just here kicking the tires. They want to make it a profession.”