BassBlaster

Science: Classic Coverage

Not everyone gets the chance to travel to the host site and partake in the Bassmaster Classic week of events. For every bass angler roaming the Expo floor, there are probably 10 more anglers following the event from home on their computer. We like to talk about making the sport a better spectator event, something that can be watched, followed and enjoyed by many, and I think with technology and some creative thinking, we’re getting closer all the time to that goal. This week’s coverage was a pretty good example of that.

There are lots of different options available now days, and how those options get exposed and promoted makes a big difference. Here’s a few of my thoughts as being one who followed this event daily from my home, some 800 miles away.

Video (BASSCam): Video coverage is great when you can watch clips of actual on the water coverage. You get such a sense for the conditions, along with environment these guys are competing in. Plus, you get to see them actually fishing in the moment. The key though is to have enough video coverage posted regularly in order to keep someone’s attention. If that is one of your prime sources of coverage, then you need lots of clips on a fairly regular basis. Leaving a guy sitting at his computer for a couple hours waiting on the next clip doesn’t cut it. B.A.S.S. did a pretty good job of this this year, I thought.

Video (The War Room): Live streaming from behind the scenes – now we’re talking. In between clips, you can watch the live streaming commentary featuring such folks as Bass Parade’s own Jay Kumar, Mark Zona, and several of the Bassmaster staff. I’ve always thought that if you can have live commentary to keep your attention and make  an exciting competition out of cooking (Iron Chef), why can’t you do the same thing with bass fishing. Additionally, bringing in the use of GPS technology to show actual boat positioning and location among competitors makes a huge river seem much more like a manageable arena.

Live Blogging: More technology. You can’t be everywhere all the time, but getting constant updates from guys out on the water following the competitors makes a nice addition to the video coverage. Live blogging is like Twitter on steroids. Not limited to 140 characters, you can take the space to post specific thoughts and details. Again, a great way to add to the coverage when video might be a little slow.

BASSTrakk: This one has been a pet peeve of mine. In the past, this had been one of the least reliable ways of getting information about what was happening on the water. To me, it doesn’t add drama when you don’t have info from a quarter of the field, or when the reports you do have aren’t even really close to what a competitor might have swimming in his well. It’s not that difficult for any regualr tourney guy to guess halfway accurately what kind of weight a given fish is. You should be able to get within a couple pounds or so of a bag of bass with some degree of correctness. They’ve dropped the ball in the past, but they did a pretty darn good job this time. Nearly 70% of the first day trackings were within a couple pounds of actual, and most all guesses were conservative and not overinflated. This was a big win in my eyes. Check out the accompanying tables I tabulated from the first two days of competition in this regard.

Here’s the Day 1 Scorecard:

And here are the Day 2 Stats:

Leaderboard/Live Weigh-in: Last but not least, being able to somehow watch or get real-time updates as anglers weigh-in is critical. Most of the big organizations do this pretty well, and this years Classic coverage was no different.

Overall, I thought B.A.S.S. did a really good job of having enough options and available technology at hand to make following the event from home a very realistic and exciting thing. Add in additional things like photo galleries and copter footage, and I came away from this year’s event with two thumbs up!

So, who else followed updates and coverage online, and what were your thoughts of this year’s event?

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Jeff Hahn

    February 27, 2012 at 8:56 am

    Yep, I was glued to my computer, especially the War Room on Sunday. I think B.A.S.S. did a great job of coverage for those of us who mainline Classic info like it was heroin!

  2. Dave

    February 27, 2012 at 10:01 am

    You should give props to the man that pioneered live on the water coverage, Mark Jeffries at BassZone.com. Everything that Jeffries has done has been followed by Bass and everyone else. BassZone was the first site to blog and show live video and photos from the water many years ago way before Bass or FLW. They should let Basszone take over the live coverage at Bass. No doubt, the best live Bass coverage on the web. They do it the right way.

  3. Mike Fillmer

    February 27, 2012 at 11:44 am

    Really liked the War Room!

  4. Scotty Melvin

    February 27, 2012 at 1:30 pm

    First off, whoever had the ‘war room’ idea should be commended. Great idea. And it was handled pretty well. I had a couple of pet peeves, but nothing major.

    The only way to make the online coverage better would be to put actual video cameras on each boat, and give viewers access to each boat, or have BASS just do the thing like a live tv show and go from boat to boat, depending on what is happening. I know it’s possible. But so is the announcer-less game, with all players mic’d up, and that hasn’t happened yet. But a guy can dream…..

  5. paul zuest

    February 27, 2012 at 10:21 pm

    best classic coverage ever. great job. we dont need a bunch of suits tryin to tell us whats up. room for improvement on some of the audio. turn up the volume on interviews. watchers can allways turn it down but at max isnt allways enough. godd job . looking forward to great coverage again. PS-keep the heicopter shots. PZ

  6. Bass Pundit

    February 27, 2012 at 11:21 pm

    The War Room was a nice addition to the coverage.

    The Live Blog had an annoying glitch that you couldn’t go back to previous pages of the blog unless you went by the back arrow at the bottom. If you hit on Page # the link would be broken.

    As for Bass Zone, I hardly paid attention. It wasn’t there usual on the water and nightly recap show.

  7. Wacko

    February 28, 2012 at 6:27 am

    Yep, it was excellent coverage over the internet. The blog is my favorite. Basstrak has never worked. Not sure why other than fat cold fingers and poor eye site. I know those would be my problems.

    The weigh-ins themselves are still way over the top for my taste but that does not mean the coverage was not good.

    Nice job by all the crew on that front.

  8. Macsimus

    March 2, 2012 at 6:35 pm

    War room was fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed the unscripted, live coverage. Excellent job.

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