“At first they felt bad and had doubts” | Relief

“Very hot”, “This one”, “Sorry, I took your rebound”. These and many others are phrases that go unnoticed by any viewer who goes to the court to watch a basketball game. Or anyone who turns on the TV to follow him around the screen. However, in four years, these hitherto secret sounds have ceased to be a secret to the general public.

Tomas Satoransky was the last to undergo the Endesa League’s proposed experience of recording the protagonists of matches, so that viewers could watch the match from the inside for some time. Typically, videos released by ACB are 5 minutes long and in which Audio recordings of top-level matches are collected from the perspective of referees, coaches and players..

This initiative, which does not entail any financial compensation for clubs, developed jointly with the clubs’ communication departments. That is, both players and coaches agree to carry this microphone and camera with them during the game. So Anyone who wears a microphone because it looks good to them, as ACB’s Relevo points out.. “This is not the norm. In the NBA, this is more normative,” they note at the competition.

An experiment that emerged from silence. The same one that was tested in the Valencia bubble in 2020. “The idea was essentially born during the pandemic. We held the final stage in Valencia and 33 games were played behind closed doors. I was one of the people who was there and had to do an interview at the end of the game. In total, I watched 33 games on the court without fans and There I was really amazed by the amount of comments that players leave for coaches and referees.”Speaker – Marc Ramon, responsible for audiovisual content at ACB.

Ramon is the ideologist of the now common experiment in trying to integrate everything that happens on the field: “Everyone talks, and these are things that go unnoticed during games when there are spectators. So, After that I thought, “Damn, this needs to be shown to the fans somehow.”

Thus, after this silence, the DIA reopened all its pavilions, but they were still empty. It was here that Ramon formed his “insiders”, starting from the bench. “The first thing I did was catch someone who I knew would say yes, and that was Jaume Ponsarnau. I was in Valencia and he told me there was no problem. It was the third day in Obradoiro-Valencia. Valencia won with an instant last-second replay. It was a very, very intense and difficult match. But as a result, people see that nothing is happening and understand it.”

After the coaches, it was the turn of the judges, with all the ensuing contradictions. And even more so in the matches chosen by the ACB for the referees to wear a microphone: the Clasicos, the Super Cup and Copa del Rey finals, and the ACB title match, as well as the Obradoiro-Breogán match this season. That is, all matches of maximum tension in which words carry a lot of weight.

“In the beginning it was a Manresa-Barca game without spectators. During a pandemic. At first they felt bad and had doubts.”, admits Ramon, who explains the process of achieving those 5 minutes that reach the viewer. “I am always committed to the people I do. Before sending a message, they can review it in person first. Imagine that for some reason a moment of tension arises and the player curses or insults, in the end I don’t want him to be punished for wearing a microphone. These are things that need to be understood. “I always have the honor of letting coaches or players see it before sending it out.”

Because all of us at work can say something outrageous at any moment. “And this is what I tell them: at the end of the day, if someone says something they don’t mean, we can remove it. At the end of the day, our goal is to teach people what their job is. You can’t teach swearing.” for them to stay with him. The idea is to educate, the idea is for it to be something pedagogical, so we do it without any problem and I don’t think it’s manipulation.”– notes the head of the audiovisual content department of the competition, who is as proactive as ACB.

For now, the league prefers to do it bit by bit and assures that this naturalness and doing it at certain moments is the basis of its success with both the public and the protagonists of the videos. “If they don’t see it clearly, we won’t move forward, but there are already players who have asked us to put the microphone on.”points out the ACB to validate an experience that has already become commonplace among basketball fans.