Minium: ODU's Monarch Media produces more than 125 TV broadcasts, with most on ESPN+

By Harry Minium

NORFOLK, Va. – Two hours before the Old Dominion and Arkansas State men's basketball teams tip off Thursday at Chartway Arena, six people will be huddled in a windowless, cramped TV control room in the Jim Jarrett Athletic Building.

They will dine on Chic-fil-A sandwiches while testing equipment, poring over graphics, editing video and reviewing a script while they prepare for what will be nearly two hours of a pressure-cooker atmosphere when the TV lights come on.

At the same time, five camera people will be across campus checking out their equipment, and the broadcast crew of Scott Jackson and Billy Mann will be prepping courtside.

Welcome to the world of Monarch Media, the little-known broadcast arm of ODU athletics that, in all, televises more than 125 ODU athletic events from late August through mid-May.

Thursday’s game will be broadcast on ESPN+, an online subscription streaming service that has brought the world of college athletics directly into the living rooms of millions of fans in a way that was totally unimagined just a few years ago.

While ESPN’s linear outlets (ESPN, ESPN2, etc.) are available on cable or streaming services such as Sling or DirectTV, ESPN+ must be purchased separately, with a monthly subscription coming in at around $10.99.

As a Hulu subscriber, I pay a little less.

More than 25 million households subscribe to ESPN+ and when you add the tens of millions of family members and friends who also watch games, the potential audience is huge.

The move to ESPN+ has been a boon to ODU athletics. While Sun Belt Conference schools are prohibited from releasing audience ratings, the 125 events in 2023-24, and the games that were broadcast on ESPN linear networks, provided ODU with an estimated $52 million worth of media coverage.

That was a $6 million increase over 2022-23.

"It's only going to get bigger," said Eric Bohannon, ODU's senior associate athletic director of broadcasting and communications. “The ESPN+ audience continues to grow.”

While the very best college football and basketball games can be found on broadcast or cable networks, ESPN+ is the place to watch a ton of good football, basketball, baseball and so many other sports that you can’t find anywhere else.

On any given night you can watch college athletic events from all over the country, from a Cal Poly volleyball game to a New Hamprisre hockey game. Some nights, there are hundreds of choices.

On a typical Saturday afternoon there are about 60 football games broadcast. Most are only of regional interest, but each weekend, ESPN puts one or more of its linear broadcasts on ESPN+ and that makes the service so much more valuable.

On the final weekend of the football regular season, you could watch Georgia Tech-Georgia battle it out in eight overtimes on ABC and on ESPN+ in what was likely the best game of the season.

On any Saturday during the winter, you can catch more than 100 men's college basketball games and on Sundays  more men's games and a ton of women's basketball games.

ESPN+ also offers ODU fans and student-athletes and their families the opportunity to watch games, home and away, from remote locales. A student-athlete from the West Coast can be comfortable in coming to ODU because his or her family will be able to watch games from thousands of miles away.

And because ODU joined the Sun Belt Conference, the quality of those broadcasts have improved immensely in the last 2 1/2 years. 

When I came to ODU in 2018, ODU broadcast many home games on Conference USA TV. Most games were televised as inexpensively as possible and didn’t reach a broad audience.

That all changed in 2022 when ODU joined the Sun Belt. Not only did the football get better, so did the quality of televised games and the potential audience for ODU broadcasts.

ESPN has more exacting standards than did C-USA-TV. ODU had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into new equipment and in hiring more talent. Both ESPN and the Sun Belt Conference office worked with ODU to improve its TV steaming service.

Prior to ODU joining the Sun Belt, the radio voices of ODU – Ted Alexander, Andy Mashaw and James Witham in football – did double duty, as their radio broadcast was simulcast with the streaming TV production.

While that saved money, it led to some headaches.

Home radio crews have leeway to call games from the home team’s perspective. Alexander is amazingly sharp and sometimes critical during his broadcasts, and that serves the ODU fan base well. So are Mashaw and Witham, who call games the way they see them, and sometimes, that means being critical of the Monarchs.

But they had to tone that down when doing TV as well as radio. TV broadcasters on ESPN+ try to be entirely neutral because fans of both teams are watching and deserve a quality broadcast.

"I'm an ODU fan, but you have to be neutral on TV," said Scott Jackson, an ODU graduate who does play-by-play for men's basketball on ESPN+.

 "I can't be over the top. You have to check your emotions because so many fans of the visiting team are also watching."

After joining the Sun Belt, ODU began casting the net widely for broadcast talent and the TV crews for ODU’s largest athletic teams are all veteran journalists or veterans of their sports.

And, thank goodness, the change allowed Ted to be himself on the radio.

Chip Tarkenton, a veteran TV sportscaster from Richmond, is joined by Mashaw on football broadcasts. Mashaw, a media production specialist with the Norfolk Fire Department, has been doing ODU football radio broadcasts since the program began in 2009.

Tarkenton teams up with former ODU women’s basketball star Kim Aston to do ESPN+ women’s basketball games.

Tarkenton was sports director at WRIC-TV in Richmond for 23 years and maintains a full schedule of freelance work that includes frequent appearances doing VMI games. If you need a voice-over for a TV or radio ad, he's also your guy.

A University of Georgia graduate, Tarkenton is a true Southern gentleman, and his voice has a tinge of a Southern drawl. He's also plugged in to athletics in a way more than your typical journalist.

He's been to a ton of postseason NCAA tournaments, bowl games, NASCAR races and Super Bowls. And in recent years he's doubled as a teacher at St. Christopher's school in Richmond, though he gave that up this season to focus on ODU athletics.

"I love working with the people at ODU," he said. "Everyone here is very professional. And they're dedicated to putting the best product they can on the air.”

Mashaw does extensive scouting reports on every ODU football opponent. He scribbles large depth charts, with notes on each player, on an oversized piece of canvas.

“Andy is amazing at how much research he does,” Tarkenton said. “I wonder if Ricky Rahne could use Andy’s help in scouting.”

Aston is a former ODU women's basketball player and is the headmaster of the upper school at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy. She and Tarkenton are working together for the third season.

Tarkenton does play-by-play, while Aston offers color commentary. And they have an obvious chemistry - they genuinely like each other.

"Kim is perfect for this job because she knows so much about ODU women's basketball," Tarkenton said. "She knows the history and adds so much perspective.

"We have become close personally. We talk a lot during the offseason."

Mann is a former ODU player, the one whose steal and layup with seven seconds left led ODU to a victory over then No. 1 DePaul in 1981, and is the color commentator for men's basketball.

Jackson is a Northern Virginia native who is a fan of all sports in the DC area. He worked in Jacksonville, Florida and Raleigh and nearly two decades in the DC area as a sports broadcaster.

He began his career at WGH radio in Virginia Beach right out of college.

He is in his ninth season as the host for the Washington Commanders' postgame radio show on the NFL team's radio network. Although he has a youthful face, Jackson has three decades of radio experience.

He was a freelancer in Washington in the summer of 2023, and working hard to find gigs to pay the bills, when Max Media hired him to host the critical 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. drive time broadcasts, along with Witham, on Priority Auto Sports Radio 94.1 in Virginia Beach.

"I was so happy to return to the 757," he said. "This is where I started. But I have so many great memories of working in the DC area."

One of his best memories was doing play-by-play for the Commanders radio network in 2022 when Washington faced the Atlanta Falcons, and a surprise starter for that game was former ODU quarterback Taylor Heinicke.

"I described us as the first quarterback, play-by-play combination in the NFL," Jackson said. 

"Working ODU men's basketball games is a dream come true.”

Mann has had a varied career. He worked in economic development for the city of Norfolk and for four years was general manager of the Norfolk Nighthawks indoor football team.

He is now CEO at Mannpower Enterprises.

"Billy is the mayor of ODU basketball," Jackson said. "Everyone comes and greets him before games, and they all talk about the shot against DePaul.

"He cares so much about ODU and has such a great history. He’s really plugged in with a lot of the former players."

It is the behind-the-scenes people who really do yeoman’s work.

Bohannon, who many of you know as the sports information contact for ODU football, is also responsible for every streamed event, and when there are glitches, he’s the one who hears about it. In the end, it is his call as to who to hire to telecast games.

Boyzie Hayes, ODU’s director of video, is the hands-on guy. Boyzie is in the control room for every televised event, and that means he gets out of the office to see games live and in person vary rarely.

When he was hired at ODU in 2011, Hayes was doing highlights videos and interviews for the odusports.com web site.

“His job has changed a lot in recent years,” Bohannon said. “He now does a lot more work as a producer and director. He’s teaching people how to use cameras and all of the equipment in the control room.

“His title doesn’t do justice to all that he does for us. Boyzie does a little bit of everything.”

When ODU joined the Sun Belt, more cameras were required, and every event required at least one person in the booth calling the game. Years ago, some events were broadcast live with no broadcaster.

Hayes, a Norfolk State graduate, has a long list of freelancers that he hires as camera operators as well as a producer, director, two graphics people, a replay person and sound person for each game. Scheduling people to cover every game, he said, can be like trying to herd cats.

Hayes oversees each broadcast from the control booth.

He works with a producer, who makes sure the videos, graphics and storylines all mesh, and the director, who pushes the buttons that dictate which camera appears.

The atmosphere is the control room is hectic. Directors watch seven cameras at once during football games and make split-second decisions on which to use. Replay guys must figure out what plays deserve to be seen again, and often, they have only seconds to decide.

Everyone in the control room communicates via head sets, and the director even has the option of talking to the broadcasters themselves.

Tarkenton spent the first half of a men's and women's basketball doubleheader in the control booth watching Hayes and his crew work.

"I wanted to see how things work at ODU behind the scenes," Tarkenton said. "Boyzie does a tremendous job. They were organized and focused. I was so impressed."

Hayes rarely gets out to see an ODU football or basketball game in person because he’s always in the control room.

“When I’m able to go to a game, seeing things in person really helps me,” he said, adding that he will go inside the ESPN trucks and watch the ESPN crew work.

While the quality of broadcasts has improved, the number of events has not increased. That means that some ODU home games are not streamed. That’s in part because ODU’s current setup doesn’t allow for the broadcast of two home games at once.

“We’re really grateful to our coaches, who have bought into what we are doing,” Bohannon said. “They’ve agreed to change some game times when there is a conflict.

"If you play one game at 1 p.m. and another at 5 p.m., you can broadcast both events. And we want to broadcast as many as possible.”

Monarch Media is also grateful to Dwayne Smith, ODU’s executive director of technology solutions and information technology.

“I don’t know how we could manage without Dwayne,” Bohannon said.

Smith helped oversee the physical improvements necessary to connect ODU’s venues – S.B. Ballard Stadium, Chartway Arena, the ODU Soccer Complex, Bud Metheny Ballpark and L.R. Hill Sports Complex stadium – to the control room.

“We had to make some major upgrades in recent years, from laying fiber optic wire to upgrading our equipment,” Hayes said. “Dwayne has been a huge help getting us through all of the change we’ve gone through.”

Bohannon said that he’s happy with the improvements that ODU has made in recent years.

“We’re in a much better place now than we were before we joined the Sun Belt,” he said.

“But we still have improvement to make. We know we can be better.

"We’re always striving to provide our fans the best production possible.”

Minium is ODU’s senior executive writer. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram