Charlene Belew
Managing Editor
@CBelew15
A pair of new faces have taken the helm of the Cameron sports show.
From “The Pickaxe Report”, with anchor Adrian Alexander, the scene has now shifted to “Game Time”, featuring two co-anchors, Makenzie Burk and Haley Swinford.
The two ladies, both Communication majors, spend about six to seven hours each week producing one episode of the show.
“We put a lot of work in the show because we do it all ourselves,” Burk said. “We shoot, we edit, we write, we produce. We pretty much do everything so we have to plan out what we’re doing in the next show early in the week, schedule our interviews, we have to go shoot them, so a lot of work gets put into this show.”
To tag along with a new name, new graphics and new anchors, both students set out on a mission to make the show more relaxed and conversational.
“We wanted to bring a little bit more of a relaxed environment to the show,” Burk said.
Our intro describes our show. It’s really relaxed, it’s kind of conversational. It is fun, it’s not so serious.”
Burk, a softball player for the Black and Gold, said the show inspires not only her love for athletics, but also herself in obtaining her ultimate dream job of being a sideline reporter.
“I get to do what I love,” Burk said. “I get to report on what I love. I’ve done sports my whole life and my future goals involve reporting on sports. It’s giving me more of an opportunity to experience what I want to do when I graduate.”
Swinford, whose love for sports comes from and is inspired by family, jumped on the opportunity to be a part of “Game Time” as soon as she could.
“They said they had a sports show opening, and when I started college, I wanted to be a sports reporter,” Swinford said. “That’s why I really got into this major. It’s nice to be able to have something that correlates with what I want to do later on in life.”
Swinford believes the show serves more purpose on campus than just providing herself and her co-anchor with “on the job” experience.
“It’s not just about us,” Swinford said. “We want it to be about the athletes and the coaches and what’s going on. We want to bring more fans to the games. We want athletics to be more emphasized.”
In the first four shows, which range from about four to 10 minutes, Burk and Swinford both said they’ve come a long way.
“The very first time we saw the first show we immediately saw our flaws,” Burk said. “I noticed both of us were very stiff and very not smiley. The next show comes around, and we are a lot more comfortable, we work a little bit better with our hands, but we come across a different problem with our audio.
“The next show, we fix our audio, we come across a different problem with our prompters. It’s better for me to get this opportunity to come across these problems now than it would be if I worked at channel seven later on first time in front of a camera.”
In the end, both agree they feed off of energy the other produces.
“Sometimes I feel like if she messes up I’m more likely to mess up,” Swinford said. “I feel like we give positive and negative energy to each other. If I’m excited, she’s more likely to be excited or vice versa, but the negative energy still kind of hits us too.”
For the rest of the semester and continuing on into the spring, the duo has many plans they would like to implement into their shows, including guest speakers, different camera shots and the use of the green-screen.
Burk said so far in the semester, the highlight has been making it through their first episode in a smooth manner.
“Just finishing the first show was the best feeling,” Burk said. “Episode two and three we had to restart at some point. The first episode we went straight through. Of course, there were things we had to work on after the first episode, but it went so smooth.”
“Game Time”, which is filmed at 1:45 p.m. every Monday, is available on the Cameron campus TVs as well as aggiecentral.com.