Every broadcast program has a version of the same Tuesday. The game's four days out, and half the prep list is still sitting in someone's head.
THE PROBLEM WITH "READY"
Most programs have a gameday process. Camera positions, who's on audio, who's running graphics live, that part usually gets written down. What doesn't get written down is everything before it: the roster, the pronunciations, the call to the away coach, the questions for the interviews.
Skip that part and "ready" just means whatever the teacher remembered to do in the last hour before kickoff.
Jordan Burns, who runs Nixa LIVE in Missouri, put it simply on the show: gameday SOPs tell you what to do once you're in the gym. They don't tell you what has to happen before you get there.
WHY IT KEEPS HAPPENING
A few years ago, Jordan had two student announcers build something genuinely impressive. They got access to their coach's play-drawing app and broke down formations live during the pregame show, three segments deep, closer to an ESPN pregame desk than a typical high school broadcast.
It worked, because those two students knew the whole process, start to finish.
Nobody wrote any of it down.
The next year, both announcers graduated. The students who inherited the segment got the assignment, not the system. Some weeks, Jordan says, they were lucky to have a recorded pregame show at all.
The community noticed.
"When the prep work is there, everything just moves more smoothly. When you don't prepare, you scramble. That's the biggest thing." - Jordan Burns, Nixa LIVE
THE FIVE THINGS TO LOCK BEFORE KICKOFF
Nathan and Jordan built the sequence live on the show, five steps, starting the moment a game lands on the schedule.
Lock the roster and start chasing pronunciations immediately, and if you're not sure how a name's said, ask a player instead of guessing, they're usually less intimidating than a coach.
Reach out to the away coach with open-ended questions, since a yes-no question gets you a yes or no and nothing else.
Decide what graphics you need ahead of time instead of building them live, keeping the ones you reuse every week locked at the top of the list and the game-specific ones editable below.
Write real interview and storyline questions before the game, not between plays.
Then run one final check the night before: roster, coach contact, graphics, and questions, all confirmed, so if something's missing, you find out Thursday night instead of Friday at six thirty for a seven o'clock kick.
None of it happens in the gym. That's the point.
Ready isn't something that shows up when the lights come on. It's a list you finish first.
Nathan and Jordan built a free Pregame Prep Checklist with these same five steps, download it at striv.education/pregame-prep.
If you're a teacher feeling like you're on an island, we've created a community just for you. Future Ready Educators is our community of Digital Media and Broadcasting teachers. Go to futurereadyeducators.com to join. It's completely free, and teachers are sharing tips and tricks that save them time.
The Broadcast Ops Playbook is a product of Striv Education.