Ball State Sports Link Students To Be Embedded With Women’s Final Four Teams

For the first time, Ball State University’s Sports Link, the nation’s first fully immersive digital sports program, will be capturing the behind-the-scenes story of the 2016 NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Championship in Indianapolis.

Sports Link will have students embedded with teams throughout the championships at Banker’s Life Fieldhouse. Sports Link student teams will be field producers capturing stories, reaction, and info from NCAA-related events and participating teams throughout the NCAA Women’s Final Four in Indianapolis.

Banker’s Life Fieldhouse will host the D-I, D-II, and D-III championships. In the D-1 semifinals,  Connecticut will play Oregon State in one semifinal at 6 p.m. and Syracuse will play Washington in the other at 8:30 p.m. The winners will meet April 5 at 8:30 p.m.

In a continuing educational partnership with the NCAA’s digital and social media department, as many as 30 digital sports production students under the direction of Chris Taylor, senior director of digital sports production, and Alex Kartman, director of digital sports production, will assist in the operation of social media curation, engagement and digital content production for both the men’s and women’s championship events.

Taylor, along with graduate assistant Austin Russell, will lead the digital content for the NCAA Women’s Final Four in Indianapolis. Taylor’s team starts today at noon when the first team arrives at the airport.  Each team will have a student “embedded” with them.

On Friday, Sports Link will have its own media day with each head coach and five starters, then going to a private event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with each team.  Students will create videos for social media and to be posted at NCAA.com and espn.com and http://espn.go.com/espnw/.

Ball State students have been working with March Madness starting with the First Four games earlier this month. Students created content, filtering content, responding to content, and operating an array of social media tools to provide fans the best experience.

Kartman, along with graduate assistant Torey Fox, will coordinate digital coverage at the NCAA Men’s Final Four in Houston.

The partnership builds on year two of a digital externship created in 2015 between NCAA Digital and Social Media and Ball State Sports Link.