Fox Sports Indiana Celebrates the Hoosier State’s Love for Hoops With Basketball Day Indiana

13-hours of live programming, unique graphics package set the stage for special day

Basketball and the state of Indiana are a match made in heaven, and, on Saturday, Fox Sports Indiana will present a day jam-packed with hoops action to celebrate the Hoosier State’s favorite sport at all levels.

Fox Sports Indiana’s presentation of Basketball Day Indiana will include a two-hour whip-around show enabling viewers to watch three college games simultaneously.

The second-annual Basketball Day Indiana will feature nine games and 13 hours of live programming from high school to college and the pros, all across Fox Sports Indiana and Fox Sports Indiana PLUS.

The highlight of the day is likely to be a two-hour window from 2 to 4 p.m. ET, when the network will present a whip-around–style show, offering three college games (Purdue at Indiana women’s, Nebraska at Purdue, and Seton Hall at Butler] taking place across the state.

The day’s festivities are done in partnership with the Indiana Pacers/Indiana Fever and the Indiana High School Athletics Association (IHSAA) and will be largely centered at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where four girls’ and two boys’ high school teams will get a chance to play on the floor the morning of the Pacers game against the Chicago Bulls.

Centering much of the day’s events in Bankers Life Fieldhouse has proved beneficial to the team from Fox Sports Indiana, easing some of the logistics around crewing and production equipment. The network will roll up two IMS Productions trucks (HD1 and B1), which will support the live game broadcasts, and will deploy a special studio set erected inside the arena.

“Having done it once, it was a lot easier to look at the matrix of staffing,” says Larry Mago, executive producer, Fox Sports Indiana, Fox Sports Midwest, and Fox Sports Kansas City. “We already had a roadmap. It’s still demanding. We are tapping the market of crew people and bringing people in.”

Since Fox Sports Indiana is run largely from the offices of Fox Sports Midwest in St. Louis, it’s typically a full truck-based road show for NBA and WNBA broadcasts from Indianapolis. The network partners with Chicago-based Program Productions to aid in crewing events it covers in Indianapolis.

“It’s an interesting endeavor because we’re not using a home control room,” says Mago, who previously worked with the Pacers for 25 years.

The network is deploying some of its best talent on this event, including many that help make Pacers productions possible throughout the year. Jamie Berns, who directs Pacers games for the network and is an employee of the team, will help direct one of the high school games in addition to the NBA game that night. A contingent of producers from Fox Sports Midwest in St. Louis are also making the trip to Indy to work on some of the games.

The Fox Sports graphics team has gone the extra mile to help give Basketball Day Indiana special treatment. The day’s events will have their own, unique, and comprehensive graphics package. Everything from score bugs to replay moves, lower-third graphics, title cards, and more will feature Basketball Day Indiana branding.

“They’ve gone all out in making this thing appear constantly special,” says Mago. “It’s not a generic show at all. The entire graphic treatment is Basketball Day Indiana.”

Here is the full schedule of the day’s events from an official release from Fox Sports Indiana: