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06/06/2018 08:30 AMMany a hardworking executive producer may dream of the day they’ll take home their first National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) award, but Guilford’s Christopher “CJ” Rogers, 21, has just lived the dream.
While NATAS is best known as the professional service organization bestowing the industry’s coveted Emmy Award, it also works to support rising stars, like CJ, with its annual NATAS Student Award, the Crystal Pillar.
On June 2, CJ stepped up to the stage at the NATAS Boston/New England Student Awards for Excellence and claimed his Crystal Pillar as the first-place winner of the chapter’s 2018 Sports-Live Event category. The prize selection was based on CJ’s highlight reel of live Special Olympics coverage he developed for Emerson Channel Sports (ECS) as executive producer.
CJ says he has his Guilford Public Schools experience in Unified Sports to thank for putting him on the path to producing the compelling live television event as a student at Emerson College in Boston. CJ will enter his senior year at Emerson in the fall.
“I’ve always been involved in Special Olympics, and Unified Sports is where it all started. A friends’ mom got us involved in 5th grade, and I was in it right through high school,” says CJ. “My aunt also has special needs, and I have a few good friends who have special needs as well. The community is what I’m doing it for—to have them feel as I felt as an athlete on the court.”
CJ graduated from Guilford High School (GHS) in 2015 and played basketball and baseball for the Indians. He continues as an Emerson student athlete with the school’s Division III baseball team, playing catcher and left field.
“I was just going to study journalism,” says CJ. “But I got lucky—there was a new coach, so there were some fresh eyes, and I walked on.”
CJ also continued his connections with unified sports athletes at Emerson, joining the Student Athletic Advisory Committee. Members assist with area’s Special Olympic Community Games held at the school in January.
“It’s round-robin style; it’s very casual and everyone has a good time and gets to play a lot of games,” says CJ, who’s volunteered as a referee and in other areas to help out with the games in the past.
When he’s not volunteering, playing baseball, or continuing his exceptional academic work at Emerson, CJ holds down a job as executive producer for ECS.
“We produce all the live athletic games at the school,” says CJ, who started off as on-camera “talent” his freshman year before becoming ECS executive producer in his sophomore year.
As a junior with two years of executive producer experience, CJ felt putting the 2018 Special Olympics Community Games and ECS together for a live television production was right in his wheelhouse, so he took a shot at pulling it all together.
“It’s held in our gym, where we have all our control rooms, so my idea was we would treat it as any other game, and if anything, we’d take it a step up, with cameras on the sidelines to do interviews,” says CJ. “I pitched the idea to my boss at [ECS], but before I did, I reached out to Special Olympics Massachusetts and talked to one of the coordinators, Charles Hirsch.”
Hirsch loved the idea of live coverage. So did CJ’s boss at ECS.
“My boss has done a lot of live events in the industry and runs the whole Emerson channel,” says CJ of Emerson College’s award-winning college television network. “She thought it was good idea and sent it out to everybody.”
Meanwhile, Hirsch put CJ in contact with the area’s Special Olympic team coaches, who also got on board with the concept.
“One of the things I told them was that all the players could have an opportunity to get camera time; they could be interviewed in a team setting or one-on-one or whatever they felt comfortable with,” says CJ. “Special Olympics also gave me four videos I used as commercialization through the production, which also gave me some stuff to have our anchors go off of.”
In addition to delving into videos covering events like the Special Olympics Law Enforcement Torch Run, CJ discovered his production aligned with the 50th anniversary year of the Special Olympics movement. Chicago will host the Special Olympics 50th Anniversary global celebration from July 17 to 22.
“It was all a really good basis for me to start my research,” says CJ, who also put out press releases and communicated the event across campus, encouraging students to pack the gym for the games.
When the day of live show arrived on Jan. 28, CJ says he knew he had prepared as much as he could for the huge undertaking he was about to pilot with his ECS team.
“To prepare so everyone was all on the same page, I made a rundown, which basically is the schedule of how the production is going to go, with every second timed out, like when there’s a change of games, you toss to the sideline,” says CJ. “But with a live production, you can just throw that rundown out—and we kind of did! We had a basis for what we were doing, but after that, it was all on our toes.”
The 3 ½ hour production featured five students as on-camera talent, covering five teams in action: the North Attleboro Big Red Machine, Brookline Cougars, Mansfield Green Hornets, Mansfield Black Hornets, and the Heated Lions Seniors.
“We were doing play by play and color with two sets of commentators...We had the half-time report, [and] the whole time we had a host in all the interviews who was kind of the face of the show,” says CJ. “We had two very hardworking gentlemen up in the control room—you usually need three or four to do instant replays, technical directing, and doing all the scoreboard. They were hitting all the buttons and directing the cameras for us.”
CJ had five cameras set up on the action.
“We had four on the game play and one in the interview corner, where you could actually see the action on the court” as the interviews were underway, says CJ.
It may sound hectic, but looking back, CJ says, “It was a lot fun. It was different from what ECS usually does, and a good way to interact with another athletic community in the Boston area, and a way to expand the ECS platform a lot.”
ECS live streamed the event on the ECS youtube channel. After the live show ended, CJ had a short window of time—less than two weeks—to develop a highlight reel to meet NATAS’ February entry deadline for the 2018 Student Awards.
Did we mention all of this took place right before the start of baseball season?
“I edited a three-hour production into a 30-minute highlight reel, and I thought it turned out very well,” says CJ. “I submitted it in the second week of February.”
Honorees were notified about two months later.
“I heard when I was back in class,” CJ says. “I was sitting there, and they were sending out congratulatory emails to all the people that won. I thought, ‘That’s cool,’ and I opened the email, scrolled through and my name was the fourth one to win first place.” On June 2, joined by his parents and student winners in other categories representing colleges and universities across New England, CJ accepted his NATAS’ Crystal Pillar Award during a glitzy event at the Marriott Boston Copley Place.
Speaking to the Courier in advance of his winning night, CJ admitted, “It hasn’t really sunk in. I’m sure it will when I get there! Up until now, I’ve just been thinking, ‘Okay, this is a lot of fun,’ and before that, I was just in the moment, getting it all done. At the awards show is when it’s going to sink in.”