Behind the scenes of the behind the scenes: USU athletics’ award-winning video operations
As featured in the 2021 Football Preview Magazine
Behind every great football team is a great video team providing footage for coaches and content for the fans. The video operations in the Utah State University’s athletic department is no different.
The Utah State video team has three different areas they service: coach’s film, creative content and live streaming. They do full video productions for seven sports: football, volleyball, gymnastics, basketball, track and field, cross country, tennis and softball.
Their work is invaluable, according to head football coach, Blake Anderson.
“Things don’t work without that crew,” he said. “I mean, obviously their names don’t come up a lot. And they’re not on the front page of the paper or anything like that. But when you consider basically everything that we do is videotaped, and we evaluate it, reevaluated a million times. You know, if they’re not on their job, and they don’t do an efficient, effective job, then we don’t operate effectively.”
The man that makes it all happen is award-winning video coordinator, Bill Garren.
Garren is in year 16 as the assistant athletic director for video operations for the Utah State athletics department. He’s a football guy —playing the sport in college at Ricks College and Idaho State University. After his playing career, he began working as a video coordinator and a coach at San Jose State and Idaho State. He started in his current position at USU 16 years ago.
The extent of his video experience before being hired at ISU was playing around with his dad’s camcorder, but he enjoyed the challenge of figuring things out on the job.
“What drew me into this job in the first place is the challenge of it, learning how to adapt,” Garren said. “With what we do, we’re in an environment that’s always challenging and changing. And so you got to roll with the punches, you know, find out what’s going to be successful for the players.”
As director of the video operations for 16 years, Garren has seen firsthand the growth that video has made, from VHS tapes to DVDs to completely digital, but he has also seen the growth USU athletics has made.
Garren was involved with construction projects such as the West Stadium Center and the Jim & Carol Laub Athletics-Academics Complex, where the video operations are now housed.
“Those to me are very exciting to look back at, aside from the wins on the field, and the success of the athletes, which is great, and that’s what we’re here for,” Garren said. “It’s really cool to see us grow as a university and as an athletic department.”
Garren has won the title of “Video Coordinator of the Year” from the Collegiate Sports Video Association a total of seven times in both the Mountain West Conference and the Western Athletic Conference.
He attributes these wins to his staff, especially his staff of student videographers.
The video team includes 20 or more student assistants who help with filming, editing, creating content and live streaming. There are typically seven students working at the football practices —five on the field filming and two inside editing film as the team practices.
“We work with a lot of students,” Garren said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of students that have filtered through here for years. Some of them stayed five years or more, some of them stayed a year. They’ve all contributed to the success of this program.”
But you can’t win Video Coordinator of the Year without a standout video coordinator.
“Bill does a great job of not only managing everything here, by just going the extra mile and making sure everyone is taken care of, knows their job,” said Jayden Sanders, the assistant director of video operations. “And I think that’s why we’re so successful is because he helps people understand why it’s important, why we do what we’re doing and how it matters.”