You've watched a game on ESPN and thought, "What separates us from that?"

It's not the cameras. It's not the announcers. It's the graphics.

The score is always on screen. The team names are always right. When a player makes a big play, something pops up. When you tune in mid-game, you know exactly what's happening in about three seconds.

That's not magic. That's a system. And it's more buildable than you think.

Watch Week 2 of the Striv Summer Series

Why Graphics Matter More Than You Think

The NFL didn't always have a score bug.

There was a moment when someone decided to put the score on screen for the first time. Then the down and distance. Then the game clock. Each one was a deliberate decision to help viewers understand what was happening, not just watch it.

That's still the job. Graphics orient your audience. They tell a casual viewer tuning in late what the score is, what quarter it is, and why this game matters. They keep people watching when the action slows down. And when your watermark is in the corner, they tell the world who made this.

A working score bug on-air every game beats a full animated package that only works when the right students show up.

That's the principle the whole session was built around.

Start With the Basics. Lock Them In.

There's a progression here, just like gear. Jump to intermediate before basic is solid, and you'll be scrambling every game night to keep up with what you started.

The basics are four things.

A score bug. Score, period, and teams. That's the minimum. If you can add game clock and shot clock, great. But score and period are what keep viewers from bouncing when they tune in late. Get it on screen. Keep it there.

A school watermark. Put your logo in the upper corner, not the bottom. If a media outlet ever grabs your footage, they'll put their own graphics across the bottom and cover yours. Up top, it stays visible. If your broadcast ever makes the highlights somewhere, people will know who shot it.

An intro graphic. This sets the scene before tip-off. Matchup, records, location. It gives your announcers something to work with and signals to viewers that this is a real broadcast, not just a camera pointed at a gym.

Lower thirds. Coaches. Band director. National anthem singer. Cheerleaders. These can be built in advance and queued. They give your graphics student something to do throughout the whole game, not just during the action.

The Principle Jordan Kept Coming Back To: Repeatability

Jordan Burns has been running Nixa Live for six years. The thing he talks about more than any specific graphic is whether it survives without the student who built it.

When a student leaves, the graphic they created and managed often leaves with them. The fancy animated lower third that looked incredible junior year? Nobody knows how to run it in their senior year. Nobody knows where the file even is.

A simpler graphic that anyone on your crew can operate and update will always beat a complex one that only one person understands. Repeatability isn't a ceiling. It's the foundation on which everything else gets built.

Jordan's solution: one shared Google Drive folder for all graphics. Everyone knows where to find them. No more hunting through email threads the day of a game.

What Jordan Has Built (and How He Got There)

The demo at the end of the session was worth the full hour.

Jordan runs Singular Live connected to a master Google spreadsheet. When he changes the school name, the logos, colors, and team data update automatically across every graphic. Four games in a tournament? He's not rebuilding eight different team packages. He clicks through a dropdown, and it populates.

His pregame show has four student picks with team logos, records, and school colors pulled in automatically. His students fill in the spreadsheet. The graphics update.

He didn't build it all at once. He started manually, making graphics in Canva and uploading them to a shared folder. The integration came later, after the basics were repeatable. That's the order. Build the foundation first. Add the automation when you're ready.

The Assignment

You don't need to build what Jordan has. Not this summer.

What you need is your baseline locked in and repeatable before fall. Pick the one graphic your program doesn't have but should. A score bug. A watermark. An intro graphic. Build it, save it to a shared folder, and make sure someone other than you knows how to run it.

That's the starting point. Everything else gets added on top of that.