Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 1: Kansas Athletics Brings New Production Power to Rebuilt David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium

The Jayhawks’ Rock Chalk Video team modernizes infrastructure, control rooms, videoboards

Before the first fans filed into the shimmering gates of the reconstructed David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium at the University of Kansas. Before the rhythmic claps to the KU fight song rattled off the freshly backed seats behind the north end zone. Before a sell-out crowd of 41,525 cheered on a season-opening win on a late-August Saturday afternoon. Mike Lickert walked to the 50-yard line and stopped.

He had stood on that field hundreds of times before. His shoes are resting on the turf painted with the famous Jayhawk logo, which has been the crest on nearly every polo he has worn to work for almost a quarter century. And yet, it was all so different.

The University of Kansas opened the completely renovated David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium this season. (Photos: Kansas Athletics)

On that hot August morning, the old bowl was gone. A new west stand rose above him, wrapped in steel and glass. The videoboard, a canvas that he and his Rock Chalk Video team have long painted on, loomed closer to the field and stretched taller and wider than any display the university had ever installed.

“I was just amazed,” recalls Lickert, Associate Athletic Director, Rock Chalk Video, KU, “because, almost my whole professional adult life, I have been here. I’ve been at the University of Kansas. I looked around, and it’s a whole new stadium. I was kind of in awe. Not a lot of people get to do this. This is pretty cool.”

That moment came before the Jayhawks’ Week 0 kickoff against Fresno State, the first game in a reimagined stadium and a new era for Kansas Athletics. For Lickert and the Rock Chalk Video team, it was more than a fresh venue. It was the culmination of years of effort to rebuild the university’s video-production infrastructure from the ground up — control rooms, trucks, and displays included.

Phase 1 of a Multi-Phase Project

For KU, the facility upgrade wasn’t a single project. It was part of three carefully orchestrated phases of the university’s Gateway District project, a massive development intended to transform the Lawrence campus’s northern entrance.

MORE: Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 2: A Pro’s Guide to Kansas Athletics’ New Video-Production Infrastructure

Phase 1 began with demolition of “The Booth” following the 2023 football season and finished in time for the 2025 season. It started with a full retrofit of Rock Chalk Video’s 53-ft. production truck, a vital unit that handles the majority of Kansas’s ESPN+ coverage of sports like soccer and softball and serves as a mobile production hub for selected neutral-site events.

The new primary videoboard at David Booth Memorial Stadium is a Daktronics build measuring 52 ft. high by 100 ft. wide and featuring a 13HD pixel layout.

The following summer brought sweeping upgrades to Allen Fieldhouse, where longtime systems-integration partner Alpha unified two previously separate control rooms into a single shared ecosystem. The redesign supports both in-venue videoboard shows and ESPN+ streaming broadcasts for men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, and volleyball, all within one interconnected infrastructure.

During the stadium reconstruction, Rock Chalk Video built a brand-new football control room in tandem with the new architecture. The result is a purpose-built, modernized production environment integrated from the ground up with the new venue’s fiber backbone and LED display systems.

“Consistency was the design priority,” explains Jeff Volk, VP, Sports & Entertainment Group, Alpha Video. “They have common systems that [the crew] can get familiar with across the board. That’s important for both operations and education.”

A Production Program With a Purpose

Rock Chalk Video is defined as much by its people as by its workflows. Under Lickert, the department has become one of the most admired collegiate live-production operations in the country.

Included in the rebuild were new control rooms for both in-venue videoboard programming and live game distribution to ESPN+.

Central to that success is Director, Broadcast Engineering, Andy Leslie, who led much of the on-campus integration work. “Andy did monumental amounts of work throughout the four control rooms to get it done,” Lickert notes.

Surrounding them is a team that balances daily content creation with live-event execution: Curtis Lorenz, senior producer; Travis Calvin, technical video production specialist; Andrea Woods, director, video production; Sam Converse, creative video production specialist; and Jackson Hadley, creative content specialist, football. Together, they not only oversee hundreds of events for ESPN+ and in-venue boards but also train the next generation of Jayhawk student crew members, who cycle through the program each semester.

“We use a lot of students,” Lickert emphasizes. “It was important for us to have unity throughout the control room so that they could go in and, if they’re doing replay in the truck, it’s the same as what they’re doing in the ESPN room, same as what they’re doing at football and basketball.”

That consistency is built on a shared technology backbone standardized across all venues and comprising Ross Video switchers, Ross routing, Evertz DreamCatcher replay, a unified Dante audio environment, and familiar operator workflows.

The Game-Day Canvas

At the heart of the football experience is a new Daktronics display system that signals a dramatic leap forward for in-venue production in Lawrence. The main board — measuring 52 x 100 ft. — is 2½ times larger and 60 ft. closer to the field than its predecessor. Two levels of continuous ribbon boards wrap the bowl, with additional fascia slated for installation in Phase 2.

The LED package is powered by Daktronics Show Control. The immersive-experience production system gives Rock Chalk Video operators a flexible content canvas for live video, replays, animations, stats, and sponsorships. Driven by the stadium’s new control room, it features enhanced camera positions, PTZs at field-level goal lines, and two PTZs in the renovated tunnel for the player entrance.

Included in the David Booth Memorial Stadium was two long ribbon displays.

It’s also a stunning canvas allowing the Rock Chalk Video creative team to thrive. That group — headed by longtime Jayhawk, Associate AD, Creative Services, Douglas Sheppard — can spread their proverbial wings in a much more exciting way during football games.

The tunnel experience itself has been transformed. KU has revived an old favorite: the animated Jayhawk Jet intro paired with “Enter Sandman,” a nod to the program’s late-1990s board-show roots.

“We have a true tunnel walk with LED lights,” Lickert says. “That has already become a cool addition to our show. It’s a true modern stadium with true modern amenities.”

Camera Coverage That Matches the New Stadium Experience

The rebuilt stadium also brought a major lift to Rock Chalk Video’s image-capture footprint. Kansas rolled out a new fleet of Sony HDC-3200 series global-shutter cameras paired with long-glass Canon 80X lenses, giving the crew dramatically sharper images and more flexibility on game day. The upgraded camera complement includes handheld units, studio positions, and a refreshed wireless system leveraging Wave Central transmission, ensuring reliable coverage from the tunnel walk to the goal line.

“It’s totally different,” says Lickert. “We got nice new glass and nice new cameras in our new stadium. Some of the glass we were using was 25 years old. Now we can do some fan-cam stuff and just some basic reach-out-and-touch-people shots that we weren’t able to do before.”

Kansas also added new Panasonic 4K outdoor PTZs for fixed positions, updated POV mounts, and integrated the entire camera fleet into the same Ross- and DreamCatcher-based production ecosystem that drives their football, basketball, and ESPN+ shows. The result is a unified capture platform that supports everything from cinematic pregame intros to clean, reliable angles for replay and review.

Building for What’s Next

The new stadium is just the beginning. Phase 2 of the Gateway District project will add an amphitheater, hotel, student housing, and a public plaza. Rock Chalk Video’s technology is already engineered to support it.

“The project isn’t over,” Lickert says. “At the end of this year, more construction [is] going to come. It’s a multi-year project that is going to be unique.”

The stadium will eventually support more than football. Kansas anticipates concerts, special events, possibly esports showcases, and community programming — all requiring video-production support. As those needs grow, the infrastructure built this summer will be ready for it.

MORE: Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 2: A Pro’s Guide to Kansas Athletics’ New Video-Production Infrastructure