With around 12,000 athletes and 74 playoff teams, the need to make Athletics more available to students, families, and coaches is at an all-time high.
In order to fully highlight program successes and increase accessibility, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) Sports Next’s SportsEngine partnered with FISD to introduce a new broadcasting service.
“It gives a lot of control to the athlete where they can highlight clips and share their own content that they have on the field or on the court. Our community also gains full access to sports, so traveling parents or grandparents who live in another state can view all of this content. And, It gives our sports broadcast students a huge resource,” said Broadcast Facilitator and Kuykendall Stadium Broadcast Engineer, Steven Doherty
Family members, athletes, fans, and community members can access live streams of FISD sports games on FriscoSportsLive.com for the 2023-24 school year.
Sports like baseball, basketball, football, soccer, softball, track and field, volleyball, wrestling, swimming, and diving will be covered.
“Every game will be shown for all sports where we have cameras set up. So any time a game is at a FISD venue or at the Kuykendall Stadium, Ford Center, or Toyota Stadium, it will be broadcasted,” said Matthew Wixon, Facilitator for Athletics Communications. “Our one exception is cross country and tennis, We would like to [broadcast these] at some point, but it’s hard to show multiple courts.”
Streams of team practice won’t be available.
“Coaches don’t want rivals to be able to see what they are doing in practice, so we want to give them the opportunity to have those practices privately,” said Wixon.
In order to access the streams, people must subscribe to FriscoSportsLive.com.
There are two types of subscriptions, a 30-day subscription for $9.99, and an all-access yearly subscription for $79.99.
Once you subscribe to the site, you can pick which content you want to stream.
“When you log in and create your account it’s going to ask you to follow teams. You can follow multiple teams, multiple schools, just one school, [and/or] one team. You can also change who you follow after [making your account],” said Doherty.
Regardless of school or sport, all of FISD Athletics will have equal amounts of footage. The total estimate for athletic events that will be showcased is around 4,000 per year.
“Because there [are] cameras installed in all the gyms, every game for every school is going to be covered. This includes middle school and their gyms,” said Wixon. “The only thing is we will have a game of the week which NBC chooses, so there might be schools which get more games of the week, [but] that doesn’t really change anything.”
Along with the extensive coverage, live streams for each game are compatible with all devices.
“Right now FriscoSportsLive.com is best on the web and on a computer, but you can download SportsEnginePlay and that app will get you the same content on any device,” said Doherty.
Currently, the program has plans to remain as a permanent service.
“We have a contract with NBC for about 3-5 years, so we plan to keep it and hopefully continue it,” said Wixon.
Overall, NBC Sports Next’s SportsEngine has opened up a variety of opportunities for the FISD community.
