What does the T-Mobile High School Basketball Invitational have in common with the final round of a golf major, the Olympics, the Super Bowl pre-game show and March Madness?  Elite talent and long, long hours of production time.

When you cover an event that entails producing 4 straight games, never getting off the air at halftime or between games, if you don’t have a killer team working with you, you’re in deep, deep manure.  Keeping an audience engaged for 7 plus hours straight on back to back days is quite a challenge.  But once again, the CBS College Sports guys rose up to the challenge.
 
Here is glimpse in to what went in to that show:
 
A set day where our mobile unit was stuck in the mud (literally) and delayed our production and technical teams from getting going.  Once we got the truck out of the mud, we were back on track.  And all it took was 2 producers, 2 directors, 2 associate producers, associate directors...

[deep breath]

...1 tech manager, 6 cameramen, a full staff of engineers, audio and video personnel, gfx operators, tape and Elvis operators, 2 sets of announce teams (Jason Knapp and Pete Gillen for the boys and Ann Schatz and Tammy Blackburn for the girls), a sideline reporter from MaxPreps, a Host (Adam Zucker) and even a TD who had become a dad the day before the show and still managed to work the event – now that is dedication!

14 hours of Live TV with no relief in site = A job well done by our production and announce team for hanging in there and delivering our viewers a terrific event. If you enjoy high school basketball, this is a good one to see. You can catch a look back at the event - on CBS Sports January 16th at 2:30pm ET.
 

In the Bonus for this week:
 
Villanova at Temple men’s hoops from December 13th – Excellent work on getting off the air after the BIG upset by Temple with live shots and not forcing a taped roll-out when the action on the court told the whole story…as fans ran on the court to celebrate with their Owls.
 
Vandy at Notre Dame women’s hoops from December 31st – Very cool beauty camera with wide angle lens was put up on the catwalk high above the floor and gave a unique look at the sold out arena for the Irish.