5 minute read
Making Live Game Magic
BY LAUREN FILIPPINI (ALPHA CHI, BUTLER UNIVERSITY), MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER
No, Fran Rotella (Theta Tau, Rutgers University) can’t get you courtside seats to tonight’s NBA game. As the NBA’s associate vice president of live game production, Fran isn’t courtside herself. She doesn’t even have an arena seat – during games, she’s usually in a truck in a parking lot. But Fran can give you an inside look at how the game gets to your TV or smartphone, and she’s happy to share advice for sisters who want to follow in her footsteps!
An Emmy-winning sports media executive, Fran had her sights set on the television industry in college. After a few years at MTV, during which she fell in love with the live aspect of TV, she moved into sports, taking on roles at ESPN, the NFL Network, NBC Sports and now the NBA.
It was the love of storytelling that brought her to the sports industry. “I’m not an athlete,” she says, laughing. “In my mind I am, but I know I’m not an athlete, although I did play in the Alpha Chi flag football event for charity years ago. I just love the stories of the athletes.”
Fran says some people questioned her jump from MTV News to sports, particularly as a woman. “If I was a male, no one would ever ask, ‘Do you really know about football?’ Yeah, I do … You have to study twice as hard.”
But with supportive colleagues and results that speak for themselves, Fran says, “I never felt like I was the only woman in the room, even when I was the only woman in the room.” And she uses her unique position to inspire more junior female employees to seek the heights and show them the path to executive levels. Fran adds, “I always try to hammer home [that] if there are two seats at the table, two women aren’t fighting over one seat.”
Fran thrives on the live aspect of television. “There’s nothing like it. It never gets old,” she says. “There’s just this rush, and you prepare for a bunch of different outcomes, and sometimes it goes as planned and sometimes it goes in a totally different way … The best producers are the ones that are willing to kind of veer off and throw the rundown out the window and just go with it.”
In her executive role with the NBA, Fran is tasked with innovating and thinking about the future of game broadcasts. When you watch a basketball game, are you watching on your TV? Or on your tablet with a streaming service? Fran has to think about both – and more! “At the end of the day, it [the game] still needs to be produced. It still needs to be high-quality,” Fran explains. “Maybe it’s shot in a slightly different way, maybe presented in a slightly different way … but [it’s still] the basic premise of storytelling and bringing fans into the arena.”
Fran is focused on the small details like camera angles, but also on the far reach of the NBA – from local broadcasts to national events to fans around the globe – and the ever-evolving technologies changing the way people experience a game. Her job is demanding, with work on nights, weekends and holidays, so she tries to take a step back and appreciate the incredible athletic events she’s been part of. She recalls, “I was on the ice after a Stanley Cup-clinching game, and I had to stop myself, like, ‘OK, take a moment and really remember this.’”
Juggling many priorities is a skill Fran learned from her collegiate days. Serving as the Theta Tau chapter president, Fran says she developed organization skills that helped her balance academics, sorority involvement and internships. She emphasizes the value of internships to not only provide experience but also help students understand what they want in a job. She explains, “I’ve had direct reports that said, ‘I think I want to go to law school.’ And I say, ‘Well, then that’s what you should do. And hey, if you want to come back to sports, you could be an agent, [and] teams have lawyers.’ There’s not one, defined career path. It’s wide open.”
A wide-open career path has been important to Fran, too, keeping her motivated through gaps in employment. When Fran’s NBC job was eliminated during the pandemic, she took on various projects for the network in the interim. That was the year she worked on the Super Bowl and the Olympics and won her first Emmy after 11 nominations. “It was a wild, wild year,” she says. “You have to remind yourself of your self-worth and know that the opportunities come.”
Key to finding those new opportunities? Networking. “It’s really about connections,” Fran says. In fact, her now-boss was a mutual acquaintance; she didn’t know Fran was unemployed (since she was keeping herself so busy with projects) and was looking for “someone doing what Fran does for NBC” when she was writing the job description. Another connection let Fran know of the opportunity, and Fran has been at the NBA since!
“You have to not be shy about reaching out to people,” she encourages our job-seeking sisters. “It doesn’t matter what industry, it doesn’t matter what you want to do. People will always find time to talk about their experiences and their companies.”
And Fran says that network should include Alpha Chi Omega! “I honestly feel like I could use my Alpha Chi network to talk to anybody because you have this common bond.” Whether in professional contexts or personal connections, Fran has seen the value of our sisterhood. “Those bonds – they don’t just go away. You’re just automatically there for your sisters.”
