JumboCast: Webcasting for College Athletics

| | | | | | | | |

Steve Clay

Bullpen Media president Steve Clay has been delivering college athletics content over the Internet since 2000, and has become an industry expert in integrating the disparate range of elements that produce a successful college sports webcasting project:

the selection and integration of audio, video and computer equipment;

mastery of webcast encoding tools, and the creation of software to simplify the encoding process;

extensive interaction with networks and network personnel in academic settings;

enhancing end-user interaction with the webcasts via customized, easy-to-navigate web sites; and

the training of announcers to deliver superb play-by-play and analysis, and of video production personnel to deliver terrific-looking webcasts.

A 1990 graduate of Tufts, Clay spent most of his undergraduate career writing sports for The Tufts Daily, a labor of love for which he was honored in May 1990 with the inaugural Tim Horgan Award as the university's outstanding sportswriter. Later that year, Clay helped bring Tufts sports back to campus radio station WMFO's airwaves, and subsequently served as WMFO's Sports Director from 1990-2002.

Called "the dean of New England small college football broadcasting" by TuftsSports in 1996, Clay also called Tufts basketball and hockey games for WMFO, as well as the memorable national semi-finals and championship of the 2000 NCAA Division III Women's Soccer tournament.

After twelve years as the voice of Tufts athletics on the radio (and a successful improvisational foray into webcasting when the WMFO transmitter went down in early 2000), Clay founded JumboCast in 2002 to deliver audio and video webcasts of a wider range of Tufts sports. Since 2002, JumboCast has presented over 300 webcasts in thirteen varsity sports. Clay helped cap the first-ever season of Tufts baseball broadcasting in 2002 by calling all four of Tufts' NCAA regional games in Harwich, MA, as well as the All-Division New England college baseball all-star games from Fenway Park in 2002, 2004 and 2005.

Clay's contributions to the book Jumbo Footprints: A History of Tufts Athletics 1852-1999 earned him — sixteen years after writing a column about his play in a Daily-Observer touch football game entitled 'How I Pulled Every Muscle I Ever Thought I Had' — an honorary varsity letter from Tufts.

In 2005, Clay started Bullpen Media, which, through its sites D2Cast.com, D3Cast.com and NEsports.tv, deliver college, amateur and professional athletics webcasts. Although this new role has lessened his day-to-day involvement with JumboCast, Clay was honored to call the 1,000th football game in Tufts history for JumboCast at Trinity in October 2006.

In addition to enabling institutions such as Bates College (Lewiston, ME) and Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ) to produce their own webcasts, D3Cast has also presented several conference championship webcasts, as well as all twelve games of the 2006 and 2007 NCAA New England Division III Baseball Regional tournaments in Harwich, MA. In addition, NEsports.tv was selected to present live webcasts of the 2006 and 2007 Head of the Charles crew regattas. D3Cast's 2007 partnership with the D3sports.com family of sites — including D3football.com, D3hoops.com and D3baseball.com — will help deliver D3Cast's webcasts to a much larger audience.

In late 2006, the NCAA — in a project presented by its broadcast partner CSTV — selected Clay to produce live video webcasts of marquee Division II football and basketball games, as well as some Division III NCAA Championship events. While working on this project, Clay stepped back behind the microphone in November 2006 to call his second NCAA Division III national championship game, the field hockey final between Ursinus and Messiah.

Clay lives in Marblehead, MA, with his wife Kristen and his sons Timothy and Ryan.

Send email to Steve

< Back to Staff List

about this site | email webmaster