Playoffs & Championships

by Shelly Shankya

It’s been two weeks since the announcement that WFTDA.tv partnered with ESPN3 to broadcast the D1 and D2 Third Place and Championship games on Nov. 8. The rest of tournament season, however, will be given to viewers via WFTDA.tv on a pay-per-view platform.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how WFTDA.tv brings hours and hours of derby to your screen every fall (and they’ve been doing it since 2012). Thanks to Erica Vanstone, WFTDA Director of Broadcast, for extra information and a feel for what viewers can expect in 2015.

People! People!

WFTDA.tv works in cooperation with Blaze Streaming Media, which has one or two on-site directors/staff on each weekend, plus 2-3 camera operators. Plus, WFTDA.tv has 6 or 7 broadcast announcers at each tournament. That’s 12 people on-site at all six tournaments to make sure that roller derby action makes it to your browser.

Off-site, WFTDA.tv’s Broadcast Committee includes a Video Production Manager and volunteer Producer for commercial spots (think Bont, S1 Helmets, etc.), an IT team, and a few folks who help with score overlay.

When you talk, they listen.

WFTDA.tv has been broadcasting tournaments since 2012 (before that, broadcasts were coordinated by individual host leagues), and during that time they’ve learned a lot. Namely, they learned that when widespread outages occur, some changes have to be made. After an outage during the D1 Playoffs in Fort Wayne, IN in 2013, WFTDA.tv moved to Cleeng for processing pay-per-view payments. Plus, the team learned that viewers were willing to give feedback about coverage. They’ve used that feedback to help improve broadcasts and to support the large traffic that the broadcasts receive.

Get your stats book ready.

Beyond the feedback that viewers give, WFTDA.tv uses information from archived games, scores, and statistics to keep roller derby fans as updated as possible.

Vanstone said, “Our Announcer Pool Coordinator, Kim Deal With It from DC Rollergirls, has created a new Sports Information team to produce detailed sourcebooks for our announcers to reference during the tournaments. Our Sports Information team can tell you things like how many star passes a team has attempted in a sanctioned season. It's about to get really granular this year, and I couldn't be happier!”

The Sports Information Committee is new to WFTDA.tv this year, so be sure to listen for extra statistics during games, and keep your notebooks at the ready.

Watch more, coach better.

Vanstone points out that many of the archives on WFTDA.tv are used for coaching and research purposes. In the four years of WFTDA.tv’s broadcasting history, the most watched game has been the 2014 Championship game, with over 120 thousand views in archives and on YouTube. That’s up by three times since the 2011 Championship game in Denver, which garnered 42,000 views.

“We know that teams are watching—40% of viewers to be accurate—to improve their games,” Vanstone said. “That's huge, and it's allowed for a lot of cross-pollination of strategy and style, which is exciting. Similarly, it has offered Officiating the tools to examine its processes. One of the positions that's kind of grown out of Broadcast has been the Alt Ref, which is a really important position for Broadcast. The Alt Refs will tell us what's being discussed during Official Time Outs or Reviews, so that we can communicate that to our audiences.”

New audiences could mean more for roller derby.

After the 2014 season, WFTDA.tv looked at the broadcast from various angles, including how many viewers were already a member of the skating community. The opportunity to advance the sport in terms of diversifying audience seemed like the next logical step. And that’s where ESPN3 comes in.

“We'd like to cast our nets a bit wider than WFTDA.tv, to see what we can yield,” Vanstone said. “I do think that because of the tremendous response for Women's World Cup FIFA coverage this year, sports broadcast networks are becoming more and more responsive to the idea that if you give a women's sport excellent camera angles, broadcasters and resources, it'll have the same appeal as men's sports to the new fan. I think this is good timing for us to explore that theory.”

See the full WFTDA.tv Playoffs and Championships coverage schedule and get your viewing passes for the upcoming tournaments at wftda.tv.