Broadcast Information | NECBL Newport Gulls (original) (raw)

At Home:

Every home game is produced by the award-winning Newport Gulls Broadcast Operations department, featuring six cameras, highlights, instant replay, professional graphics, and an experienced, dedicated production crew like no other in summer college baseball.

Home game broadcasts begin at 6:30* p.m. EST exclusively on ESPN+. Home game highlights on the Gulls YouTube channel.

On the Road:

Away from Cardines Field, the home team staff is responsible for managing video and audio production of games. Production values vary from team to team; please contact the hosting team for more information about Newport Gulls road game broadcasts. All NECBL teams provide live audio and video coverage of all games through Pointstreak; via the NECBL Broadcast Network, some also provide coverage on local TV and radio. Check for availability in your area.

General Information:

Questions, comments, suggestions or concerns about Newport Gulls audio and video broadcasts? Send an email to media@newportgulls.com - even if you just want to check in and let us know where you're listening from, we want to hear from you!

Technical support for Pointstreak video and audio broadcasts cannot be provided by the Newport Gulls. Please contact Pointstreak Support if you are experiencing difficulties connecting to the game.

DVD copies of Newport Gulls home games, featuring all pregame and postgame show features, are available. Email broadcast@newportgulls.com for more information.

History:

The Newport Gulls Broadcast Operations Department traces its roots back to 2002, when Tiverton High School senior Nicholas Lima founded the Baseball Broadcasting Club to tape high school baseball games in a muli-camera format. After taping Tiverton Tigers games for public access television, Lima and his volunteer crew became flooded with requests for taping everything from band concerts and drama club plays to school committee and town council meetings, and the crew's student executive board decided to form the Tigers TV Crew to cover a broader range of events for public access throughout the town of Tiverton, Rhode Island.

After Lima graduated in 2003, he returned as co-adviser, and later as adviser for the Tigers TV Crew, and reached out to the Newport Gulls to tape games in the summer of 2004 so that his students could earn community service hours outside of the school year. After taping 13 games in 2004, the crew came back in 2005 and taped every Gulls home game, one regular season away game, and all six playoff games, home and away, for local public access, Newport County Television NCTV-18. Following the success of the volunteer crew's work, and the NECBL switching to video webcasting for all games in the 2006 season, Nick Lima began work as the Newport Gulls Director of Broadcast Operations in 2006. His younger brother, Tom, then a sophomore at Tiverton High School and an officer in the Tigers TV Crew, was promoted from Associate Producer, a position which he had held since 2004, to Executive Producer of all Newport Gulls broadcasts and productions.

On June 8, 2006, the defending-champion Newport Gulls hosted the Pittsfield Dukes in what was the only game scheduled on Opening Day. The Newport Gulls Broadcast Operations Department pioneered the league's first-ever live videocast, and the Gulls walked off to win in 10 innings. The Tigers TV Crew, as co-producer of the game, submitted footage of the 10th inning and subsequent Player of the Game interview with two-time Gull and Rhody Ram Scott Brown, who hit the game-winning home run, to the 2006 Rhode Island PEG Awards, where it won for Best Sports Program in Rhode Island.

Since that first live broadcast, the Newport Gulls Broadcast Operations has invested thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars in equipment to produce the finest-quality in-house broadcast of any team in summer collegiate baseball, and has set the standard for broadcasting in the NECBL. In the coming years, many teams, from the Torrington Twisters and Keene Swampbats to the Manchester Silkworms, New Bedford Bay Sox and North Shore Navigators, among others, would switch from using a single, stationary camera to multi-camera shoots, following in the footsteps of the Gulls. Today, Nick Lima serves as the team's Director of Media Relations and remains the team's primary broadcaster, while Tom Lima holds his brother's former title of Director of Broadcast Operations. The two brothers from Tiverton are each approaching their second decade of covering Newport Gulls baseball, and like the Gulls organization itself, strive to "Raise the Bar" each year in their broadcast production quality and coverage.

The Gulls Broadcast Operations Department's journey from volunteer high school activity to being the best in summer collegiate baseball would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of numerous individuals. While this list is not all-inclusive, the Gulls thank crew members Steve Rys, Steve Andrade, Steve Iwanski, Andrew Dion, Ray Ballard Jr., Ray Ballard Sr., Ryan Bettencourt, Dan Staskiewicz and Chris Stenning, among dozens of others, for setting the foundation for what the Gulls broadcast operation has become today.

*Note: Home game broadcasts occaisionally begin earlier than 6:05 p.m. EST later in the season, depending on the nature of pregame ceremonies. For playoff home games, broadcasts begin with extended coverage beginning at 5:55 or 5:50. Double Headers with a scheduled first pitch of 3 p.m. have a pregame show start time of 2:30 for the first game.