As the Virginia Tech men and women’s basketball teams continue their strong, winning start to the 2020 basketball season, VT Athletics’ creative team is continuing to emphasize content access as a central part of their digital strategy.
Through the INFLCR app, the VT MBB and WBB teams have downloaded and shared a combined 700+ content pieces in the last 30 days alone.
We spoke with VT Assistant Director (Men’s Basketball, Student Staff) Lance Dozier, who shared insights about VT’s content process.
How do VT basketball players approach content compared to other sports?
They really enjoy posting on their IG Story over their main feed on IG, their approach is more centered around that. They like “boosting each other up” on their IG Stories. So like, if one of them actually posts on their main IG feed, most will add that to their story and do their own caption. They also enjoy commenting a little bit too on the actual post.
The majority of the team is not on Twitter as much. If they do roll their pics from games, practices, media day or traveling, it’s typically on IG. A few of them actually prefer the travel day pics and have that as their profile pictures instead of an in-game photo. They post leading up to gameday for big games, but not for every game.
How has COVID impacted your content process?
COVID-wise, it honestly hasn’t changed too much. We still have our photographer upload pics of their games onto INFLCR about two hours after the game is done, that’s pretty steady.
In terms of content day (we had two this fall), we waited until the second one, which was a month later, and gave them everything at once. They felt like they had to wait forever, but once they got all of those pics, they were pretty satisfied (most had 50+).
So, it really hasn’t impacted us from an upload perspective.
Athletes are on their phones more because of COVID, so I would say they’re on the app more because of it, which is good.
Can you list a short synopsis of what your workflow is on gameday? How do you all prioritize things?
Our photographer takes the lead for it, and I am really proud of him for putting in the time to get pics in there rather quickly (day of).
Have to give kudos to him because he has to worry about our website, photo gallery, sponsorship posts on the video board, making sure our media have pics, etc.
We upload pics from shootaround, which usually takes place five hours out, and give them to the kids an hour after that. Then we take a few pregame pics, but don’t upload those until after the game, so those get to the athletes along with the in-game pics. Then we take pictures in-game and start tagging them (through filenaming) correctly after the game. Then our photographer dumps them on Google Drive, which is where we house our photos as a library, and then drag them over to INFLCR.
(Editor’s Note: Lance mentions tagging through “filenaming”, which refers to the tagging system that looks for athlete names in photo files, and tags them accordingly automatically. Lance also mentions dragging content from Google Drive over to INFLCR, which is possible through the Google Drive integration that allows content to be migrated from Drive directly into the INFLCR platform.)
Connect with Lance:
Twitter: @Doz_3
LinkedIn: Lance Dozier
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