By Jennifer L.C. Pridmore
Captioning a sporting event is just like captioning a news broadcast, right? Wrong. Sports programming offers unique challenges to the captioner, ranging from a required encyclopedic knowledge of the sport to an understanding of positioning captions to dealing with announcers fighting to get a word in edgewise. For some, this could be just the ticket.
In 1993 when Kevin William Daniel, RDR, CRR, and Mary Cox Daniel, RDR, CRR, went after the captioning contract for their hometown baseball team, the Oakland A’s, they already had a lot on their plate. As the owners of Bay Area Captioning, they carried a full-time news contract with the local NBC affiliate and covered their fair share of sports, including baseball, basketball, football and hockey. So why pursue this specific contract? “We loved sports,” says Cox Daniel. “The captioning followed. We were baseball fans, and that was the key. It wasn’t just something else to caption.” The Daniels found captioning sports to be an easy way to combine their great love of sports with their professional lives; their love of baseball was simply the beginning. After selling their company to Pittsburgh-based VITAC in 1998 they only captioned sports, covering everything from baseball to soccer, the Super Bowl to the Olympics. Daniel even admits growing fond of NASCAR racing through his repeated exposure to it: “I like the crisis, it’s exciting. Anything can happen at any time.”
That sense of excitement is contagious. Kathy Robson, CRR, RPR, CSR, first began captioning sports when the Daniels asked her for help covering baseball games. “I was hooked very quickly!” she says. Robson, who co-founded Cheetah Systems with her husband in 1987, was so hooked that she has been exclusively providing captioning services ever since — and recommends sports captioning to others: “Sports captioning can be for any good captioner, unless you hate sports.”
Steve Clark, who trains new captioners on how to caption sports at the National Captioning Institute, agrees. “With a willingness to practice and learn from others who are captioning sports, a strong desire, consistent steno strokes and a little speed, any realtimer can caption sports.” Having said that, however, there are some sports-specific differences and challenges to keep in mind.
The Big Difference
“The difference between captioning and sports captioning is the difference between driving down a straight country road and driving down a winding road at night,” states Clark. Why is that? To begin with, points out Cox Daniel, the time is much different. “A big story in the news is three to four minutes; most are 30 seconds to one minute,” she says. “Sports is more continuous,” with events regularly lasting anywhere from an hour or two to 11 hours in the case of one Super Bowl she and Daniel captioned, which included almost seven hours of pregame show before the actual game began. “In baseball I always pray for no extra innings,” says Cecilee Wilson, CSR, RMR, CRR, who has been captioning sports since 1996. “But even in football, which I love, the games can last up to four hours and become a physical challenge. Of course a passing game will last longer than a running game, so I always like it when they run the ball.”
The timing of these time-consuming sporting events can also be discouraging. Most occur at night and on weekends, although this is often true of captioning work in general. With sports, however, the captioner can generally say good-bye to his or her holidays as well. This is especially true of football, with all the college games scheduled for Thanksgiving and Christmas. “When everyone else is loosening their belts,” laughs Daniel, “we’re going to work.”
Unique Challenges
The challenges that are unique to sports captioning are “pretty simple,” according to Deanna Baker, RMR, speaking tongue-in-cheek: “understanding the game, terminology, euphemisms, captioning positions, spellings of names and having an interest in the game.” To begin with, solid basic knowledge of the sport and how it is played is mandatory. Following that, an understanding of the sport-specific terminology is also necessary. Knowing the difference between a touchdown and a home run is not enough; a sports captioner has to know the difference between the statistics and how to write them for each sport. For instance, in baseball Daniel cites, “A batting average is written .238, but ERA is written 2.38; balls and strikes is written 0-3, but a pitcher is throwing 0 for 3.” And then there is the terminology for such events as the X Games, land luge and skateboarding, which Daniel claims “have the weirdest names for events and techniques” and are, accordingly, difficult to caption.
Add into the mix quick-speaking announcers, whom the captioner is usually not able to actually see speaking and who often speak over one another, and writing the plays correctly becomes exceedingly tricky. Wilson recommends focusing on what exactly each announcer is saying, rather than trying to always distinguish the voices. “For example,” she says, “on local sports usually there are only two announcers, one for play-by-play and one for color.” By concentrating on what is being said, “I can generally tell who is speaking until the two announcers get into a great conversation about somebody else and their cousins, as usually happens in baseball.” Also useful is becoming very familiar with the sports-specific moves and how individual announcers talk about these moves so that the captioner can actually “know ahead of time what they’re going to say. … There are only a certain number of plays in any sport and if you learn them, you can kind of tell what [the announcer] is going to say.”
Another challenge is placing the captions, points out Baker. The action, score or statistics should never be covered up. Knowing when to simply blank the captions off the screen is also tricky, but sometimes the action calls for it, maintains Wilson. “[It] is always a judgment call, but I know I blank more for graphics and action now than when I started.” Only time and practice can help the captioner perfect these aspects.
On a personal note, because so many sports captioners love the sports they are captioning, their love of their job can become a challenge. Maintaining quality captioning while excited about a game requires discipline. Robson admits, “I do tend to cheer, scream, etc., when ‘my’ team does something good; then I have to remember to keep writing.” Her advice is to concentrate on the actual words being written; “just hear it as words,” and try to ignore the action as much as possible.
But the most-often named challenge to sports captioning is the names involved. “There are seven different ways to spell ‘Shawn,’” complains Cox Daniel. Clark points out the difficulties in knowing the difference between names that are homophones, such as “Joe Brown” and “Jo Browne.” “You may need to remember which sport the athlete or coach is involved with, or what an athlete or coach looks like, in order to choose the right steno stroke.” Non-English-based names can be especially trying. “In the same hockey game you will hear and caption the last names ‘Afinogenov,’ ‘Lefebvre’ and ‘Vanbiesbrouck,’” states Clark. “You need to recognize the name, then be able to write it phonetically.” Daniel relates one trying moment when he was supposed to be covering a dressage event for the Olympics and was suddenly switched to a Romanian basketball game for which he did not have a roster. Until a roster was found he simply could not understand any of the names well enough to even attempt to fingerspell them. “It was ‘he shoots, he scores, that guy, he runs.’”
As if the spelling difficulties weren’t enough, there is also the sheer number of names to be known. Daniel and Cox Daniel list some of the different names that a captioner might have to recognize for any given sporting event: team names, current players, coaches, owners, traded players, injured players, replacement players, hall of famers, players from last season, athletes from another sport who might be mentioned, old teams, Negro league teams, the announcers, other announcers and, in college sports, the new players as well as the seniors from last year. And don’t forget about someone like Pete Rose, who is not a hall of famer, but is very famous! Obviously, careful preparation is what makes or breaks the game for the sports captioner.
Preparation
One of the biggest mistakes a beginning sports captioner can make is to only prepare for a specific event. While event-specific knowledge is important, a general knowledge of sports and the sporting world is invaluable. For this reason, Daniel suggests that every morning a sports captioner “read the sports pages, watch CNN, go on the Internet and look up rosters; you can’t take a week off.” Clark agrees, emphasizing that the entire sports page should be read, “including the box scores. This will make those names and numbers stick in your head, as well as reinforce numbers and how they are written in each sport.” Baker also suggests watching several sports events that are captioned to see how the captioning works — or doesn’t work — with the overall play.
To prepare for a specific event, first investigate the sport itself, paying careful attention to famous former athletes, records, unusual occurrences and special terminology. The next step is to study each team’s rosters (be sure to check these before each game to keep up with trades, injuries, etc.) for all pertinent names, including players, coaches, owners, managers, reserves, stadium and announcers. Pre-enter as many names and briefs into the dictionary as possible, remembering that the type of sport dictates how much time there is during the event to make corrections and new entries. Baseball and football move rather slowly, for instance, compared to basketball and hockey. Remember, says Clark, “It’s attention to details that sets apart a good captioner — the ability to caption less-common names, historical names and the ability to keep up when the program moves at a rapid pace.”
At the very least, careful preparation can save the captioner from needless embarrassment. When Robson first began captioning, a hockey announcer made a side comment about the “check of the night.” “I thought he meant Czech, so that’s how I wrote it. Very embarrassing when I realized he meant ‘body check.’” Plenty of time and attention in the preparation stage minimizes this sort of mistake.
Sports for Everyone?
Given that a captioner is proficient in speed, is willing to work hard and learn new tricks, and spends the necessary time preparing, most experienced sports captioners agree that anyone can do sports captioning. However, that does not mean that every captioner will be great at covering sports, and certainly does not hold any guarantees for loving it — or even liking it. Wilson, Daniel and Cox Daniel all agree that loving sports in the first place is very important. “It’s like specializing in anything,” says Cox Daniel. “You’re better if you love it; for one thing, you’ll be committed to the research.”
For the people who do love sports as well as captioning, however, sports captioning could be just the ticket. “It’s a lot more fun … it’s not life-and-death,” asserts Robson. She warns, however, that there is a downside, even for the die-hard fan: “I still miss the beer and hot dog when I’m captioning baseball!”
About the Author
Jennifer L.C. Pridmore is a freelance writer from Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
By Jennifer L.C. Pridmore
Captioning a sporting event is just like captioning a news broadcast, right? Wrong. Sports programming offers unique challenges to the captioner, ranging from a required encyclopedic knowledge of the sport to an understanding of positioning captions to dealing with announcers fighting to get a word in edgewise. For some, this could be just the ticket.
In 1993 when Kevin William Daniel, RDR, CRR, and Mary Cox Daniel, RDR, CRR, went after the captioning contract for their hometown baseball team, the Oakland A’s, they already had a lot on their plate. As the owners of Bay Area Captioning, they carried a full-time news contract with the local NBC affiliate and covered their fair share of sports, including baseball, basketball, football and hockey. So why pursue this specific contract? “We loved sports,” says Cox Daniel. “The captioning followed. We were baseball fans, and that was the key. It wasn’t just something else to caption.” The Daniels found captioning sports to be an easy way to combine their great love of sports with their professional lives; their love of baseball was simply the beginning. After selling their company to Pittsburgh-based VITAC in 1998 they only captioned sports, covering everything from baseball to soccer, the Super Bowl to the Olympics. Daniel even admits growing fond of NASCAR racing through his repeated exposure to it: “I like the crisis, it’s exciting. Anything can happen at any time.”
That sense of excitement is contagious. Kathy Robson, CRR, RPR, CSR, first began captioning sports when the Daniels asked her for help covering baseball games. “I was hooked very quickly!” she says. Robson, who co-founded Cheetah Systems with her husband in 1987, was so hooked that she has been exclusively providing captioning services ever since — and recommends sports captioning to others: “Sports captioning can be for any good captioner, unless you hate sports.”
Steve Clark, who trains new captioners on how to caption sports at the National Captioning Institute, agrees. “With a willingness to practice and learn from others who are captioning sports, a strong desire, consistent steno strokes and a little speed, any realtimer can caption sports.” Having said that, however, there are some sports-specific differences and challenges to keep in mind.
The Big Difference
“The difference between captioning and sports captioning is the difference between driving down a straight country road and driving down a winding road at night,” states Clark. Why is that? To begin with, points out Cox Daniel, the time is much different. “A big story in the news is three to four minutes; most are 30 seconds to one minute,” she says. “Sports is more continuous,” with events regularly lasting anywhere from an hour or two to 11 hours in the case of one Super Bowl she and Daniel captioned, which included almost seven hours of pregame show before the actual game began. “In baseball I always pray for no extra innings,” says Cecilee Wilson, CSR, RMR, CRR, who has been captioning sports since 1996. “But even in football, which I love, the games can last up to four hours and become a physical challenge. Of course a passing game will last longer than a running game, so I always like it when they run the ball.”
The timing of these time-consuming sporting events can also be discouraging. Most occur at night and on weekends, although this is often true of captioning work in general. With sports, however, the captioner can generally say good-bye to his or her holidays as well. This is especially true of football, with all the college games scheduled for Thanksgiving and Christmas. “When everyone else is loosening their belts,” laughs Daniel, “we’re going to work.”
Unique Challenges
The challenges that are unique to sports captioning are “pretty simple,” according to Deanna Baker, RMR, speaking tongue-in-cheek: “understanding the game, terminology, euphemisms, captioning positions, spellings of names and having an interest in the game.” To begin with, solid basic knowledge of the sport and how it is played is mandatory. Following that, an understanding of the sport-specific terminology is also necessary. Knowing the difference between a touchdown and a home run is not enough; a sports captioner has to know the difference between the statistics and how to write them for each sport. For instance, in baseball Daniel cites, “A batting average is written .238, but ERA is written 2.38; balls and strikes is written 0-3, but a pitcher is throwing 0 for 3.” And then there is the terminology for such events as the X Games, land luge and skateboarding, which Daniel claims “have the weirdest names for events and techniques” and are, accordingly, difficult to caption.
Add into the mix quick-speaking announcers, whom the captioner is usually not able to actually see speaking and who often speak over one another, and writing the plays correctly becomes exceedingly tricky. Wilson recommends focusing on what exactly each announcer is saying, rather than trying to always distinguish the voices. “For example,” she says, “on local sports usually there are only two announcers, one for play-by-play and one for color.” By concentrating on what is being said, “I can generally tell who is speaking until the two announcers get into a great conversation about somebody else and their cousins, as usually happens in baseball.” Also useful is becoming very familiar with the sports-specific moves and how individual announcers talk about these moves so that the captioner can actually “know ahead of time what they’re going to say. … There are only a certain number of plays in any sport and if you learn them, you can kind of tell what [the announcer] is going to say.”
Another challenge is placing the captions, points out Baker. The action, score or statistics should never be covered up. Knowing when to simply blank the captions off the screen is also tricky, but sometimes the action calls for it, maintains Wilson. “[It] is always a judgment call, but I know I blank more for graphics and action now than when I started.” Only time and practice can help the captioner perfect these aspects.
On a personal note, because so many sports captioners love the sports they are captioning, their love of their job can become a challenge. Maintaining quality captioning while excited about a game requires discipline. Robson admits, “I do tend to cheer, scream, etc., when ‘my’ team does something good; then I have to remember to keep writing.” Her advice is to concentrate on the actual words being written; “just hear it as words,” and try to ignore the action as much as possible.
But the most-often named challenge to sports captioning is the names involved. “There are seven different ways to spell ‘Shawn,’” complains Cox Daniel. Clark points out the difficulties in knowing the difference between names that are homophones, such as “Joe Brown” and “Jo Browne.” “You may need to remember which sport the athlete or coach is involved with, or what an athlete or coach looks like, in order to choose the right steno stroke.” Non-English-based names can be especially trying. “In the same hockey game you will hear and caption the last names ‘Afinogenov,’ ‘Lefebvre’ and ‘Vanbiesbrouck,’” states Clark. “You need to recognize the name, then be able to write it phonetically.” Daniel relates one trying moment when he was supposed to be covering a dressage event for the Olympics and was suddenly switched to a Romanian basketball game for which he did not have a roster. Until a roster was found he simply could not understand any of the names well enough to even attempt to fingerspell them. “It was ‘he shoots, he scores, that guy, he runs.’”
As if the spelling difficulties weren’t enough, there is also the sheer number of names to be known. Daniel and Cox Daniel list some of the different names that a captioner might have to recognize for any given sporting event: team names, current players, coaches, owners, traded players, injured players, replacement players, hall of famers, players from last season, athletes from another sport who might be mentioned, old teams, Negro league teams, the announcers, other announcers and, in college sports, the new players as well as the seniors from last year. And don’t forget about someone like Pete Rose, who is not a hall of famer, but is very famous! Obviously, careful preparation is what makes or breaks the game for the sports captioner.
Preparation
One of the biggest mistakes a beginning sports captioner can make is to only prepare for a specific event. While event-specific knowledge is important, a general knowledge of sports and the sporting world is invaluable. For this reason, Daniel suggests that every morning a sports captioner “read the sports pages, watch CNN, go on the Internet and look up rosters; you can’t take a week off.” Clark agrees, emphasizing that the entire sports page should be read, “including the box scores. This will make those names and numbers stick in your head, as well as reinforce numbers and how they are written in each sport.” Baker also suggests watching several sports events that are captioned to see how the captioning works — or doesn’t work — with the overall play.
To prepare for a specific event, first investigate the sport itself, paying careful attention to famous former athletes, records, unusual occurrences and special terminology. The next step is to study each team’s rosters (be sure to check these before each game to keep up with trades, injuries, etc.) for all pertinent names, including players, coaches, owners, managers, reserves, stadium and announcers. Pre-enter as many names and briefs into the dictionary as possible, remembering that the type of sport dictates how much time there is during the event to make corrections and new entries. Baseball and football move rather slowly, for instance, compared to basketball and hockey. Remember, says Clark, “It’s attention to details that sets apart a good captioner — the ability to caption less-common names, historical names and the ability to keep up when the program moves at a rapid pace.”
At the very least, careful preparation can save the captioner from needless embarrassment. When Robson first began captioning, a hockey announcer made a side comment about the “check of the night.” “I thought he meant Czech, so that’s how I wrote it. Very embarrassing when I realized he meant ‘body check.’” Plenty of time and attention in the preparation stage minimizes this sort of mistake.
Sports for Everyone?
Given that a captioner is proficient in speed, is willing to work hard and learn new tricks, and spends the necessary time preparing, most experienced sports captioners agree that anyone can do sports captioning. However, that does not mean that every captioner will be great at covering sports, and certainly does not hold any guarantees for loving it — or even liking it. Wilson, Daniel and Cox Daniel all agree that loving sports in the first place is very important. “It’s like specializing in anything,” says Cox Daniel. “You’re better if you love it; for one thing, you’ll be committed to the research.”
For the people who do love sports as well as captioning, however, sports captioning could be just the ticket. “It’s a lot more fun … it’s not life-and-death,” asserts Robson. She warns, however, that there is a downside, even for the die-hard fan: “I still miss the beer and hot dog when I’m captioning baseball!”
About the Author
Jennifer L.C. Pridmore is a freelance writer from Kingston, Ontario, Canada.