USD athletics hires new director of video production

USD athletics welcomed their new director of video production, Kelsey Bathke, to the program on Jan. 31.

Bathke spent the last three years at the University of Maryland as a production assistant and then assistant director of video production. Before Maryland, Bathke graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2015, creating content for their women’s basketball and volleyball teams.

Now in charge of all video operations inside the USD athletic department, Bathke said her responsibilities have grown.

“When I left (Maryland), I was overseeing video production for all 19 teams, specifically content creation for social media and everything in-venue,” she said. “Here, you oversee all content creation, you’re managing the live events. At Maryland, I didn’t have to touch the live events so much.”

Bathke said creating an “engaging gameday experience” requires effective use of the video boards inside the DakotaDome and Sanford Coyote Sports Center, created by experimentation, communication and timing between the floor and room producers.

“Just yesterday, we were working on a couple sequences that create a better atmosphere if you can build it all together…talking with your show control operator and making sure that on defense there’s a ‘Get Loud’ on the board, and that we’re coming out to the right thing after that,” she said. “We really have to work on our timing and our scripting a little bit with teams. We’re not far off at all, it’s just a communication thing.”

The rest of the week, when the red seats inside the Dome and SCSC are vacant, Bathke still wants the Coyote faithful to see the athletes, coaches and their stories by drafting video content on social media and other digital outlets.

“On another front, there hasn’t been much content specifically catered to student-athletes that was done by athletics,” she said. “I’m very familiar with doing that on the athletics side. It’s a good opportunity to increase brand awareness, to get everything out there and tell people’s stories.”

Football signing day provided the most recent example of content Bathke aims to create. The Coyote video productions crew created graphics with the information of each signee, followed by their high school highlight reel, for South Dakota Football (@SDCoyotesFB) to send out on Twitter.

Crazy fast and as elusive as they come. @Travis_Theis5 is a tough tackle that is afraid of no one. See what we saw below: pic.twitter.com/BtL3EYIa6P

— South Dakota Football (@SDCoyotesFB) February 6, 2019

This idea arose from Chase Christiansen, the last director of video production at USD. Christiansen now holds the same position in North Carolina with the Charlotte Knights, the Triple-A affiliate to the Chicago White Sox.

“I really like what we did for signing day and that was continuing what Chase started,” Bathke said. “But there’s a lot to build on that from a recruiting standpoint. Recruiting is really important to me— helping Dawn (Plitzuweit), helping Todd (Lee), helping Bob (Nielson) get those big-name players in.”

After Christiansen announced he would be departing to the East Coast, a number of people sent the job listing to Bathke, urging her to leave the East Coast for a director spot in Vermillion, she said.

“Everybody I knew sent it to me. We were going through a pretty big departmental transition in Maryland and it was time for all of us to move on or bear down in an interesting situation for the next couple months,” she said.

Bathke chose to move on, and in late January moved into her apartment in Vermillion, two hours from her hometown of Mitchell, S.D. She said it was a change of pace from College Park, Md., which sits less than 10 miles from the White House in Washington D.C.

“It was super weird because they were like ‘okay we’ll leave the keys on the counter for you.’ On the East Coast they want to know everything about you before you can get a place,” she said. “(Vermillion) is clearly a small town; if you go to Wal-Mart after work you’re going to see people you just left work with.”

Bathke left projects hanging at Maryland, but for her final “labor of love,”, she tailed Mike Locksley during his first day as the Terrapins’ new head football coach.

“When he got out of his car, I was the first person he saw and the last person he saw when he left. So spending eight hours listening to a guy, hanging out with him, meeting his family, having him reconnect with everybody on campus, and then taking that all back to tell a story, it’s a really cool thing.”

Bathke said she wants to do the same kind of work at USD, inventing ideas to excite the Coyote fanbase and jolt all corners of campus to support their Division-I programs.

“Large-scale projects usually integrate people from the PR standpoint to the coaching staff,” she said. “That one also included campus and athletics and academics, which in tradition are very separate, so it’s really good when everything comes together.”