By Carson Vercoe | Sports Writer
From game-winning touchdowns to highlight-reel plays, social media has made these special moments easily accessible for many Baylor fans. Videos, photographs and graphics are spread all across the internet for viewers to relive the action.
Before a post reaches the public, a team quietly works behind the scenes to deliver these once-in-a-lifetime moments to people’s feeds.
Meet the Baylor Creative team.
The team creates videos, graphics, posts and more to tell the stories of more than 30 of the university’s athletic programs. From Instagram posts to hype videos on the jumbotrons at football games, the team works hard to produce as much content as possible for each team.
Within the creative team, Baylor football has its own team dedicated to video production, photography, graphic design, recruiting content and social media.
“We’re really all just 1845 Studios,” Senior Director of Football Creative Jay Crain said. “We’re really just one entity that’s 1845 Studios. Our team just specifically works with football.”
The football creative team includes four full-time staff members and 10 student interns. All members have specific roles that help content flow easily on game days, but Crain feels those roles often change.
“We’ve got videographers, photographers, designers and recruiting,” Crain said. “Each one of us kind of has our own area that we lead, but at the end of the day, we all overlap with each other and just make content and do whatever it takes to help the program.”
The team’s work goes beyond simply snapping pictures for an Instagram post.
Graphic designers create graphics for game days, photographers capture moments from practices and games and videographers produce clips and large projects.
The number of members grows mightily on football game days.
“I think it’s around 40 people that are involved in the creative process on a game day,” Crain said. “And that’s everybody from editing video to editing photos, shooting the photos and video, and then doing the social content.”
The process of getting something onto socials begins the moment it happens.
“It’s putting the photos on a laptop into, like, a shared folder,” Crain said. “It’s running video cards to our editors for them to be able to edit those clips in game. And then I, who helps her on the social side, will ingest all that stuff, figure out where it goes and what the captions are and make sure it hits the timing right, so nothing goes out too much after whatever happens in the game.”
This process isn’t limited to football.
The creative team spotlights all programs online, whether the sport is well known or receives less attention.
Matthew Kirchner, director of video production, works primarily with men’s basketball while also covering other sports.
“I’m on what we call our all-sports creative team, and that handles basically all the other sports other than football,” Kirchner said.
Kirchner works with four others to create video across several Baylor sports, so the team’s responsibilities can shift at different times of the year.
“We all sort of have to pitch in on different sports,” Kirchner said. “But we’re all one big team, and we all help each other out.”
The creative team also gives students hands-on experience with photography, videography and editing to build their skills. This lets the creative team cover Baylor’s many sports effectively.
“We have probably about 10 or so videographers on our student team, so that really spreads out our coverage,” Kirchner said.
One of the people who oversees these students and helps them gain experience is associate director of video Jake Rosas.
“Right now, we have a newer team, a young team,” Rosas said. “I’ve been working with them a lot, trying to get our team at a higher level, trying to produce more.”
Rosas believes that the new group is vital for the push to cover other sports more consistently.
“I definitely think here at Baylor Athletics, we should do a lot more for our teams, and I think the student team plays a big part in that.”
While creating content for various sports, the creative team maintains a consistent approach but knows each sport has its own personality.
“We try to maintain a somewhat standard look and feel across the athletics department,” Kirchner said. “But we also recognize the fact that different sports have different personalities on their teams.”
The goal, though, remains to tell the program’s story in a unified Baylor identity.
“At the end of the day, we’re one athletics department, so we all want to be unified in how we present ourselves,” Kirchner said.
Every team comes with its own set of challenges, and for the Baylor creative team, that challenge is time.
Early mornings and late nights are a regular occurrence for the creative team, arriving hours before the game and staying hours after the game ends.
“A lot of people work a lot of hours, whether it’s us in communications, marketing, facilities,” Kirchner said. “When you go to a game for two or three hours as a fan, most of the people working there, whether it’s me or somebody in communications or facilities, they’re probably at the arena for eight to ten hours that day.”
The creative team constantly works to deliver content, whether it takes two seconds to film something time-sensitive or three months of prep to create.
For Kirchner and other team members, the time spent on the work is something they’re grateful for.
We work with a great team; that makes it a lot of fun,” Kirchner said. “I’ve been blessed for the athletes that I’ve worked with. They’ve all been super receptive and super appreciative of what we do, so that makes it worth it.”
For many fans, the team’s finished products appear with a simple scroll, but behind that video, post or graphic are countless hours of hard work from people who want to put Baylor Athletics on the map.
