During his three-decade career as a prominent ESPN play-by-play broadcaster, Dave Pasch says he’s been on the mic for two college basketball games that ended in a court-storm. An incident occurred earlier this month when unranked LSU upset Kentucky as time expired at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, La. Pasch recalled this week a conversation he and analyst Jay Williams had with an LSU athletics department employee before the game.
“We asked, if they beat Kentucky, will they storm the court?” Pasch said. “He was like, ‘No, we’re not going to storm the court here. We’ve beaten Kentucky before.’ Well, they won on this crazy, last-second shot and, of course, they stormed the floor.”
In the final sequence of the game, you can clearly hear Williams saying, “Didn’t we talk today about whether LSU has the correct protocol for storming the court?” As ESPN cameras broadcast a wide shot of LSU fans arriving on the court.
The issue of court-storming went national this week after Wake Forest fans ran across the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum floor following Saturday’s win over Duke. Cameras recorded video of several fans making contact with Duke star Kyle Filipowski, who limped off the court, causing Duke coach John Scheyer to angrily ask in the postgame press conference, “We’re not talking about court-storming.” When are you going to impose restrictions?” ” Last month, Iowa star Kaitlin Clark collided with an Ohio State fan after the Buckeyes upset the Hawkeyes in Columbus, Ohio.
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ESPN producer Eric Mosley and director Mike Roig estimate that they have worked 16 to 18 college games where fans of one team have stormed the court. There were many storms on the court when a team suffered a loss to such giants as Duke, Kansas or Kentucky. Roig directed Arkansas’s 80–75 win over Duke on November 29, and you can see the wide shot cut by Roig as fans flocked to the Bud Walton Arena floor.
Mosley said that production planning for court-storming occurs well in advance of tip time. ESPN production crews pre-scout where they can find a safe location for their reporters and camera operators to interview a winning coach and player. Directors like Roig hold meetings with camera operators a few hours before the game to discuss protocols and various scenarios, including an attack on the court. The camera setup is such that the audience has access to as many entry points as possible. For a regular season college basketball game, there are typically five non-manned hard and robotic cameras. They are located in places safe from crowds. Then there are three hand-held cameras operated by operators located on the baseline and center court. (Wake Forest-Duke’s overhead camera got the best shot of what happened to Filipowski.)
“When we meet with (the sports information director) on site for certain games, the first question is whether there is a desire to create a ruckus on the court or whether security will allow it,” Mosley said. “We are finding out where the student section is and what is the security situation there. We ask where can we get our cameras and reporters to meet the coach and star player for a post-game interview? We try to get ahead of that thing as quickly as possible because we don’t want to get caught in a situation where our people like Holly Rowe, Jess Sims, Chris Budden and our camera people are unsafe. We don’t want them to get trapped and crushed. For the most part, we’ve been quite successful.”
The play-by-play broadcaster for the Duke–Arkansas game was Dan Shulman, who estimated that he has called 20 to 25 games that included court-storming during his career as an ESPN broadcaster. (Shulman is also the TV voice of the Toronto Blue Jays.)
“As much fun as they look on TV, I’m always worried about what might happen,” Shulman said. “I remember I was court-storming at the Louisville-Charlotte game, and Doris Burke, who was the sideline reporter at the game, was trying to get an interview with the Charlotte coach, and I was worried for her safety. There was complete chaos on the court.
“Whenever there is an uproar in the court, it becomes difficult for us to see what is actually going on on our table. We can only really see the people closest to our table. Sometimes the student section may be behind our broadcast location, so knowing that they are headed our way toward the court can obviously be a little unsettling as you are trying to navigate the broadcast. . I think for the most part, people in television hope that when it happens, everything goes well, and no one gets hurt. There’s no doubt that it’s a great spectacle to watch on TV, which a lot of viewers enjoy. But for me, the risk is more important than the reward.”
Bob Fishman agrees with Shulman. Fishman retired from CBS Sports last year after a 50-year stint between CBS News and CBS Sports and directing 39 NCAA men’s Final Fours, including Michael Jordan’s title-winning shot in the 1982 title game and the following year. Includes North Carolina State defeating Houston. Fishman said he has thought a lot about court-storming recently and would never ask a camera operator to run down the court, making sure they maintain a position under the basket and whatever. They could shoot him.
“I think I’m pretty firm on what needs to be done – you can’t ignore it,” Fishman said. “It’s not like a streaker running across the field at a football game, you don’t show it. I think you have to show it because it is part of the story and especially now when players have been injured. I’d like to throw a wide shot of some kind to it, maybe from a backboard camera or a high aesthetic camera as we call it. Then I would make sure that my cameras on the court were recording everything and that thing was being fed into a tape machine. I will never broadcast it. But I think you have to show something that, in my mind, is a high shot.”
Broadcasters and production crews, especially at 24/7 news outlets like ESPN, have to follow a story to its conclusion, whether they are live on air or not.
“We have to keep in mind that documentation continues even when we’re off the air,” Mosley said. “We have to take it as a news. For example, some of Filipowski’s stuff happened after the crew had already signed on and the network had moved on to another game. We are taught and told again and again that we have to stay there and document as long as possible. That’s because someone will be looking for that stuff.”
Mosley and Roig say they often think about how to document court proceedings without glorifying the action.
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Roig said. “You’re documenting it and making it engaging at the same time. As a director, you are walking that line. As directors we are always taught that when someone comes on the court or the field, you don’t show them. Because more people will do it if you show them. It is getting wider and farther away. But it’s a slightly different animal, isn’t it? We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people coming to court. …You are blurring the line of documentation or glorifying it. You have to have the mindset that you are documenting it, but at the same time, you have to be careful about how you are documenting it.
During a segment on ESPN’s “First Take” on Monday, longtime ESPN college basketball commentator Jay Bilas criticized sports broadcasters for glamorizing court-storming.
Bilas said, “Years ago when fans would run onto the field or court during games, it was network policy not to show that because we didn’t want to encourage it.” “So what does this say about the way we use these images in the media now? We cannot deny that we encourage it. Or at least tacitly approve of it. For this everyone will have to accept some responsibility. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to allow this, but I know it will continue.”
Roig said: “It’s a really touching point because as directors, it’s a great scene, right? You want to display it. But I never had one like that until last week (with Wake Forest-Duke), where it got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore.”
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(Top photo of the scene after Saturday’s Duke-Wake Forest game: Corey Knowlton/USA TODAY)
