ESPN’s College Gameday, now in its 36th season as the sports network’s pre-game high school football program, is one of the most iconic television systems for sports fans. During school football season, the screen travels to school campuses across the country for the first game. of the week.
College football enthusiasts are familiar with the on-screen talent, and Lee Corso, in this series since its inception in 1987, then in the studio before hitting the road full-time in 1995. The existing iteration of the series still includes Corso, along with Kirk. Herbstreit (since 1996), Desmond Howard (since 2005), host Rece Davis (2015) and Pat McAfee, who is now in his second year as an analyst. Several other collaborators make weekly appearances, however, in the scenes, perhaps there is one like it. wider cast of characters.
These truckers bring Gameday to the site for the week, build the set a few days before the three-hour Saturday morning show, and dismantle everything before setting off on their way to their next destination.
Led by Game Creek Video operator Tommy Marshall, the organization of seven truckers and dozens of engineers and technicians do all this work every week through the fall. In addition to Marshall and Game Creek Video, other truck operators and corporations involved in the production of the show:
Minus Marshall, the rest of the Gameday team, clockwise from the more sensible left corner: Bill Verberkmous, Cameron Sheckels, David Day, Walter Allen, Nigel Cork and Gerry Glass.
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Driving for the team, maximum niches in the road transport industry, is a secondary task in the production of cellular television of this type.
“It’s pretty funny. I’ve driven four8 years of my life, about four million miles, and I’ve never driven goods,” Marshall said.
He has been in the truck entertainment business since 1976, when he started in music, transporting for rock and roll bands. He toured with bands for 28 years and sought to make a replacement and was hired on cell television, driving. for Game Creek Video, where he is now the company’s longest-serving pilot.
He has been touring College Gameday every fall for the 20-plus years.
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Marshall and the other driving forces of the excursion will depart for their destination on Sunday and arrive no later than Wednesday. If the destination is not satisfactory in a day – and is not so able to justify a driving force of the team – the driving forces are accommodated in hotels each. and every night.
Marshall said Pat Sullivan, founder of Game Creek Video, former general manager of the New England Patriots and son of Patriots founder Billy Sullivan, told him when he hired him 20 years ago that he wanted him to be well-rested and happy, and told him he will stay in hotels every day.
“We know where each and every hotel is at every address in the country that has truck parking,” Marshall said. “We know where everyone is. Once we know where we’re going, we jump into the app” and tell them that “they will stop in this town because we have already stopped there, there are fancy restaurants nearby. “
Overdrive reunited with Marshall and his team the second week of the football season, when College Gameday was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on September 9 for the Alabama Crimson Tide and Texas Longhorns game. The week before, the Gameday team was in Charlotte. North Carolina and the following week in Boulder, Colorado.
During an ideal week, university officials allow the equipment to be on campus around noon on Wednesday to begin unloading. However, some universities prefer to start later, at five or five thirty in the afternoon, to allow some university students and academics to leave the campus. is to unload several of the seven trucks, starting with the platform that transports roofing appliances for the stretch of College Gameday. Then they unload the truck carrying all the barricades. The third truck, Marshall said, has some of the “most scenes” for the Game Day Set.
Road transport drivers in the mobile TV production sector want to do much more than drive.
Drivers of the seven trucks work collaboratively with engineers and technicians to unload trucks with forklifts and other appliances brought in through local Sunbelt Rentals or some other device rental company, as appropriate.
Finally, Marshall’s truck, which transports the production apparatus and houses the production studio when the exhibition is transmitted, and the generator truck take the stage.
Tommy Marshall is the only Game Creek Video pilot on the Gameday tour and carries the production trailer nationwide throughout the season. He drives a 2018 Kenworth T680 lately, but has indicated he is expected to buy a new tractor by the end of 2023. football season. Its production trailer for this season is new, and the September ninth episode of College Gameday is only the unit’s fourth concert.
These two trucks are the only ones that remain this week near the plateau of the day of the match, since they are necessary for the supply of electrical energy and for the production of the house. A third, which is not one of the seven platforms carrying film equipment, also remains at the site. Site: A satellite truck that takes the signal from Marshall’s platform and transmits it to a satellite that travels to ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, where it is then broadcast to millions of television screens across the country. all in 7 seconds.
Two other teams in the operation bring electronics and jumbotrons, which are unloaded only on Thursdays, when those parts of the scenes pass by “to keep them safe and out of the way,” Marshall said. “It’s regularly the same hierarchy” in each and every one of them. week to unload trucks, “depending on the property you have to deal with. “If there is enough space, Marshall’s truck and generator truck will go out to be installed at the same time as the others are unloaded.
Game Creek video engineer Kyle Monroe said each week the College Gameday field trip was another challenge, with other settings on each school campus. Some campuses offer the team enough space to work, while others would possibly be in much smaller areas. “We want safe parameters to open everything,” he said. The dish is good. . . Gameday is an exclusive beast,” but Marshall and the other pilots “have been there for a long time” and are very artistic when it comes to creating space to do whatever it takes to keep the screen going.
As the sun began to set Wednesday night, Tuscaloosa’s Labor Day week, the pilots and crew were preparing the leveled aircraft to be built Thursday.
On Thursday, with the help of dozens of local machinists, the pilots build the entire College Gameday set and everything that goes with it.
On Fridays and Saturdays, pilots typically stay on hold until the College Gameday exhibition ends at noon ET. “Once everything is built, [the pilots] are technicians; they’re there to lend a hand” if needed, Marshall said.
Once the Game Creek Video trailer that Marshall is filming is set up, it transforms into a cellular television production station to stream College Gameday.
Once Gameday is over, Home Depot and other sponsors bring their VIPs to the level to have their images taken on the Gameday set and with the skill on screen. Meanwhile, drivers and others behind the scenes begin to tidy up their gadgets and demolish the stall.
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Many mobile TV production hosts take advantage of pay-based payment arrangements, rather than hourly or mileage-based. After all, actual driving between productions can only cover a few hundred kilometers per week. Between Week 1 and Week 2 of the 2023 season, the team only covered about 450 miles from Charlotte to Tuscaloosa, for example.
Hours of service regulations are generally not a problem. Marshall told Game Creek Video that most of his direct work for Game Creek ended late Wednesday and was free until the end of Gameday on Saturday, allowing his 70-hour clock to reset.
“Once I’ve finished all the way. . . and I have fulfilled all my responsibilities to Game Creek, if I’m helping to do something, it’s out of goodness of my heart,” he said.
On Thursday afternoon the College Gameday set is built.
Of course, you will have to comply with federal hours of service regulations when driving and performing tasks similar to your job. When you look back at the clock after the show ends on Saturday, you take stock of everything that goes into your truck and oversee the procedure of loading all the trucks to make sure everything is properly located in the trailers for the equipment to arrive. The road on Sunday morning.
“We normally finish [my truck] in an hour and 15 minutes” after finishing the exhibit, Marshall said. “But I’m still on duty because I’m still doing things in service. . . I supervise the delivery of the device to the trucks,” and it usually takes five and a half hours or so to be fit to drive the next day.
While the truckers’ paintings from College Gameday’s production would arguably go unnoticed by viewers, they don’t go unnoticed by on-screen talent. Each week before College Gameday began, host Rece Davis met with Marshall and had a brief verbal exchange with him before going on air.
At that time, they park and return to spend the night. The next day, the procedure restarts, as manufacturers indicate where the equipment will be the following Saturday. Often, the team doesn’t know where it will go until Sunday morning. Field trips, for example from Miami to Eugene, Oregon, may require team drivers to be airlifted through corporations to arrive on time for the holidays.
“If we can do it alone, we will,” Marshall said. I look at mileage and weather” to see if a team driving force is needed. “If I look at it and can’t do it, I just call the workplace and we gather seven driving forces of the team. They come and we leave.
It’s not exactly ideal to have a team driver, especially for pulling Marshall’s production trailer: your truck has almost reached its maximum weight.
Marshall said the 70 Game Creek drivers are hired through the company, as are the other drivers who work on the College Gameday team. That’s not to say there are opportunities for owner-operators in the entertainment sector of the trucking industry in general.
In the realm of music, he said several corporations are typically owner-operators. In the cellular-TV space, such as Gameday, Sunbelt Rentals-owned Filmwerks will use owner-operators affiliated with corporate force Trailer Transit if they run out of corporate trucks, Marshall said. Similarly, if a truck breaks down on its way to a job site and can’t get back up and running fast enough, rarely does an owner-operator of a company like Trailer Transit have to put the trailer back into operation and get it up and running. where it’s going.
“There is a need for owner-operators in the entertainment industry,” Marshall said.
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In addition to the College Gameday level itself, there are more scenes to build. Over the weekend in Tuscaloosa, country/pop duo Dan Shay played a brief set during and after Gameday at this level.
Not all truck drivers are made for a cellphone TV set, Marshall said. When you’re running behind the scenes, “you don’t know who you’re talking to. “He said that during his time at Game Creek, he met with Disney drivers. CEOs, vice presidents of television networks, state governors and “some of them look like you and me. “We need other people you know who wouldn’t offend anyone or say bad things.
The niche also requires a confident attitude and personality, he added. “You either have that ability or you don’t. It is anything that can be taught. Many drivers love to drive because they are dealing with anyone. In entertainment, music or sports, cell TV, this is true.
Manual transmission capability is also required: With an automatic transmission, Marshall said, it’s complicated and harmful in tight spaces to try to climb moving wooden blocks used to aim trailers. “If you have an automatic transmission, it either doesn’t move” or moves forward, he says.
Between last-minute missions, manual work of structures, dismantling of sets and other job complexities, “you have to love what you do,” Marshall said. “It has to come from the center and the soul. If you don’t have a brain put in extra effort,” that’s a wonderful job. “Even the music industry, cellular TV, is worth studying, because we are well taken care of and well paid. “
Once the school’s football season ends, Marshall switches to College Gameday for basketball season, then does everything on his schedule (professional sports, network television, and more) until the end of August, when College Gameday restarts.
Marshall noted that with Game Creek Video, the company encourages many of its drivers to take about a week off each month. “They try to take you home 8 to 10 days a month,” he said. Marshall himself, as the main driver, regularly works nonstop during football season before returning home, unless Gameday stops at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, his hometown.
“I stayed there for 48 years of my life because nothing makes me smile more than knowing that when I was doing gigs I would look for a circle of family members who couldn’t get a ticket and make sure they gave me passes and they were my guests,” he said. “Watching young kids meet their favorite band, they’ll never forget. That’s why I always do this. Here we have enthusiasts who think they died and went to heaven when I manage to get them passes, show them our talent, make them take shots with them. They are surely impressed and never forget it. That’s why I do it. It warms my core to know that I have the ability to make someone smile.
Tommy Marshall (red hat) and the truckers chat before unloading their trucks on a Wednesday afternoon on the University of Alabama campus.
Marshall plays various roles during a week in the fall on the College Gameday tour, adding that of traffic director, helping drivers navigate the tight spaces of school campuses and park where college officials allow them to do so.
Glass moves the Gameday apparatus to the place where the level will be built.
Once parked, Marshall will have to make sure his truck is on flat ground, as other people will be running inside the trailer for the show’s production. It has drawers, similar to those of a mobile home, to expand the interior space.
The College Gameday level almost ended on Thursday afternoon before the Saturday morning broadcast.
When everything is built and Saturday morning arrives, plenty of students and school football enthusiasts flock to see the three-hour program in action.
The trailer for Marshall’s Game Creek video has been expanded.
The Filmwerks generator truck includes two turbines in the long chassis of the truck driven by David Day. It is important that this truck is on a flat surface to ensure that the generator’s 200-gallon fuel tanks circulate well for the display to continue.
Backstage of ESPN’s College Gameday at the exhibition in Tuscaloosa.
During the production of College Gameday, Marshall and the other pilots on the tour acted as technicians to lend a hand if necessary.
After College Gameday ended shortly after noon ET on Saturday, the team got to work, packing up the gadgets and demolishing the décor.