Maine Channel ups coverage of sports

It’s not the Fox Network, but it’s easy to understand why the creator of The Maine Channel feels a bit like Rupert Murdoch – without the multi-million dollar fortune.

Two years after Andrew Eldridge proposed the channel to a faculty member, the soon-to-be-graduating University of Maine senior’s idea is reality.

The Maine Channel is an on-campus “network” available on UMaine’s closed-circuit system available to anyone on campus such as students, faculty members and UMaine employees. It offers everything from news to sports; music and comedy shows; and Fame in 15, an American Idol-type show.

One of its shows – Mouthguard, a satiric version of Crossfire that involves debaters taking part in a boxing match – has already become The Maine Channel’s program standard-bearer and is so popular, its episodes are regularly downloaded on the popular youtube.com Web site.

Mouthguard isn’t the only sports programming on the fledgling channel, which is in its first year of broadcasting. In fact, sports has become a staple.

“We’ve been trying to do a lot of sports: women’s ice hockey, women’s basketball, a behind-the-scenes hockey highlights show,” said Eldridge, TMC’s executive producer. “We even did a tackle football club game and the quality was excellent.”

That was in the channel’s infancy last fall. Now that the kinks have been ironed out, the plan is to air all of the club team’s home games next fall.

“We’re also doing a UMaine and New England sports preview-review show,” said Alex Shehata, a senior producer from Winthrop. “We hope to get the first one on next Friday.”

Shehata was recruited last fall by TMC faculty advisor Mark Kelley, who recently became director of journalism at Husson College’s New England School of Communications.

“It’s actually more than I expected. It gives you lots of good experience because this way I pad my resume and build tapes as well,” Shehata explained.

Freshmen Dave Nickerson and Joey Pelletier are the channel’s primary sportscasters. Nickerson usually handles play-by-play and Pelletier does color commentary.

The sportscasts are primarily two-camera efforts utilizing close-up and wide shots.

“We still have limited capability in terms of range, but we just got a new type of switcher to make our production value better,” Eldridge said. “And next year, we’re purchasing more equipment. We want to have wireless cameras so we can be more mobile.”

Eldridge was the driving force behind securing university funding for the channel.

“He approached the dean of students and the university to get a chunk of the student services fee,” Kelley explained. “We started $50,000 budget last fall with student volunteers, faculty advisors and paid employees.

“Andrew offered to head it up and got a couple shows up and running the first semester with a shoestring operation.”

Now Eldridge has 17 paid employees, 40 to 50 student volunteers, and seven “regular” shows not including student-produced short films and one-time programs on the 24-hour network, which runs four, six-hour cycles a day (the last three are repeats of the first one).

Andrew Neff can be reached at 990-8205, 1-800-310-8600 or at aneff@bangordailynews.net