Home Run
ILR is supplying the starting lineup for a new Big Red sports program called Cornell at Bat.
Nine of the live Internet broadcast's 12 staff members are ILR students. Their season opener featured play-by-play coverage of a Cornell baseball doubleheader against Albany on Tuesday at www.ustream.tv/channel/cornellatbat.
The students also provide print, online and radio coverage. Ivy League action debuts this weekend when the Cornell at Bat team broadcasts four games: two against Brown University starting at noon Saturday and two against Yale University starting at noon Sunday.
Cornell at Bat is the brainchild of Alex Gimenez '15, who kicked off coverage last spring with the help of Slope Media.
"We broadcast nine regular season games on a spotty feed with me doing play-by-play and a rotating wheel of color commentators until one of them, fellow ILR student Jesse Sherman '15, stuck late in the season," Giminez said in an interview.
Giminez was hired to cover the Ivy League Championship series by the Ivy League Conference with a broadcaster from Dartmouth College. After Cornell won the series, Gimenez and Sherman were invited on a road trip to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to report on regional playoffs.
"We had such an awesome time doing it and knew we were putting out a great product. So, we decided to lay out a plan on what we wanted to accomplish for the program and how we could make it last long after we graduate from Cornell" Gimenez said.
Cornell at Bat has checked off most of the items on its to-do list. It affiliated with the university as a student organization, purchased new professional equipment, expanded its staff by 10, built a database and worked out a deal to have games hosted for free on Cornell's RedCast feed.
It also started a weekly radio show, agreed to run music at the games, made an agreement to write baseball articles for the Cornell Review and launched a 23-game broadcast schedule including trips to Harvard, Columbia and Princeton universities.
Gimenez, who recommends following Cornell at Bat on Tumbler, Facebook and Twitter, predicts another winning season on and off the field.