TERRE HAUTE —
After 20-year-old Notre Dame student Declan Sullivan was killed in 2010 when 50-mile-per-hour winds toppled a 50-foot-high scissor lift from which Sullivan was filming Notre Dame’s football practice, it was a wake-up call for every collegiate program in the nation.
The message was loud and clear. If diligence wasn’t practiced to prevent it, any school could have had a similar tragedy on its hands.
That message was received and acted upon at Indiana State. ISU officials took one look at their own scissor lifts at Memorial Stadium — ones that swayed on windy days despite precautions taken by administration and the football coaching staff — and realized they had to rid themselves of them.
What replaced the scissor lifts is better, and more much importantly, safer.
ISU installed three camera towers on the Memorial Stadium property that not only replace the scissor lifts, but also give the football and women’s soccer program enhanced options as far as filming practices and games.
The towers have cameras that can pan 360 degrees and easily cover the Memorial Stadium playing field, and the football practice field. Better still, the towers are unmanned. The cameras are moved via remote control from within the Memorial Stadium locker room.
“The idea came up right after the tragedy at Notre Dame. I was looking into alternate ways to fulfill responsibilities to the MVC [as far as timely film trading] and to keep our student workers safe,” ISU Director of Athletics Ron Prettyman said. “Our administration saw it as a student safety and welfare issue.”
How serious was ISU’s administration about the safety issue? Most of the project — which cost just under $200,000 — was funded by the university itself and not entirely by the athletic department.
The towers — installed by XOS College Sports after a successful bid — are hard to notice at first. They are gray, thin structures that blend in with the background.
The towers are about 50 feet high. One is located in the east end zone, one is on the north side of playing field and another is located on the west side of the football practice facility. Another camera is located on the roof of the locker room, but does not require a tower.
Prettyman said the school considered several options. One was to build permanent towers from which filming could continue to be done by students, but that was not cost-effective. Another was to stay with scissor-lifts, but that didn’t solve the safety issue.
The towers that were installed were not only most cost-effective than permanent towers, but they provide a significant upgrade in technology and quality from what ISU got from the scissor lifts.
The new cameras have the capability to record practices and games in HD. They have enough range from the tower on the east end of the Memorial Stadium end zone to easily film practices on the football practice field several hundred yards away.
In addition, the turnaround time to provide home coaches who want to analyze practices and opposing coaches who want game film has been cut done drastically. With the new cameras and accompanying equipment, a practice or game can theoretically be edited into a DVD before a team leaves the facility. That puts ISU in good standing with the MVC, which has by-laws for the time it takes to trade film, a standard that ISU couldn’t always meet in the past when it had to mail film to other schools.
“One of the problems was lack of quality with the cameras we had. If you were on a scissor-lift, it was constantly moving. You had human error with the camera. The quality from the new cameras is a lot better,” Prettyman said.
For football, the cameras are another brick in the foundation as ISU signals its intent to not only have football, but to provide the program with the highest-quality equipment available to enhance the program.
“They’re unbelievable. They’re wonderful,” ISU football coach Trent Miles said. “This is the same system that Notre Dame has. Same cameras, same company, same everything. This is what the big-time boys have. This is what you have to go to because the scissor-lift could be a dangerous thing. It’s the best for safety, but it also moves the program forward.”
For women’s soccer, the new cameras are a revelation. The soccer team did not use the scissor lifts for practice or games at Memorial Stadium. Now the Sycamores have the capability to analyze their team from eyes in the sky just as football has done.
“We’ve never had that,” ISU women’s soccer coach Erika True said. “It’s important to shoot the whole field and with the hand-helds we’d been using, you can’t see the whole field or you’re too close to it. The tower that sits in the middle is the one we’ll use most. We’ll look at the entire field, we can look at our set pieces and our formations.”
The cameras also mitigate another problem — security. When not being used for the football and women’s soccer programs, the cameras serve as security devices to prevent vandalism and trespassing on stadium grounds.
“We’ve had some vandalism and graffiti problems there,” Prettyman said. “And we always worry about liability. People will sneak in to run the stairs or kids sneak in to play on the playing field and they could get hurt. Without having to man the cameras, the feed can be monitored and a police car can go out and take care of a problem.”
Indiana State University
Related Photos
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Tribune-Star/Joseph C. Garza Video surveillance: The Indiana State football team forms up at the east side of the field near a new video camera tower at Memorial Stadium on Friday, April 6.
Discussion
Eyes in the sky
New video towers, cameras make ISU stadium safer
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