Assistant Manager of Internet Operations

My career starts here, as a sophomore intern who I don’t think even got paid. The job was simple: take the game recaps our staff wrote and post them to georgiadogs.com with the CMS tools we had. I loved it. They started paying me, the hours kept growing, and when I graduated they hired me full-time — which means I spent my college years running a Southeastern Conference (SEC) athletic program’s website while carrying a full course load.

Thrown in the deep end

The Director of Internet Operations was close to retirement and delegated most of the real work to me — so very early in my career I was handling vendor negotiations, presenting options to the Board, and owning outcomes, all before I’d finished my undergraduate degree. My greatest mentor was Claude Felton, the legendary Sports Information Director, who told every intern on day one: “You don’t have to know all the answers — you just have to know how to find all the answers.” He also insisted everyone carry a notebook and pen at all times, because you never know what the press will ask and you’ll never remember it all. I owe my note-taking habit to him to this day.

By the time I left I had a full-time content creator and two to three journalism-school interns under me, owned the content production schedule outright, and traveled with the football and gymnastics teams to cover road games.

Replatforming, and a streaming service in 2005

I helped lead a complete overhaul of georgiadogs.com: a new look and feel, a replatform from CBS College Sports to XOS Digital with all existing content migrated, and the launch of GXtra — a subscription all-access streaming service carrying live video of non-televised events. In 2005, that was far ahead of its time. Getting enough bandwidth to stream anything was a real constraint, but if anyone had bandwidth to spare it was a college campus, and my superiors were all-in — we installed dedicated connectivity in every venue and made sure our in-house crews got fair access to players and coaches. As a student, I was sitting across from Coach Richt at weekly press conferences.

GXtra is the first link in a chain that runs through this whole site: streaming niche live sports for passionate fans is exactly what I’d do again at Turner, then at PlayOn Sports, on the platform that became the NFHS Network.

A football Saturday, 2004

Game day meant arriving four hours before kickoff. Tap into the live scoring system and start feeding stats and play-by-play to our hosting provider. Arrange SD-card pickup points with the on-field photographers for swaps at every quarter. Coordinate with the TV trucks for full-game recordings and copies of their melt reels. Then, as the game ended: post the recap, quarter-by-quarter photo galleries, and video highlights; get down to the media room to live-stream the post-game press conference; interview players; post those too. By 2006 I was on the sideline of every football, basketball, soccer, baseball, and softball game, every gymnastics meet, and the occasional stop by the natatorium.

I did all of it hands-on: wrote HTML and CSS, wrote short recaps, edited full games down to highlight reels in Adobe Premiere, processed photo galleries in Photoshop, ran the camera and encoder for smaller events, and produced player vignettes with a reporter. When I started, we were shooting gymnastics routines on a Sony Mavica that saved to 1.44MB floppy disks; by the end, I was walking into ESPN’s production trucks for replay-reel dumps straight to DigiBeta. And one perk no title conveys: my access badge opened every athletic facility on campus — the practice fields, the training room at Butts-Mehre, Stegeman Coliseum. I once drove my car through Sanford Stadium. Not many people can claim that.

In 2006, Turner Sports came calling.