Next-Gen A1s: Broadcast Sports Faces a Supply-Chain Crisis A variety of issues spur departures, limit training and resupply By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, December 8, 2021 - 7:00 am
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Amidst an unprecedented labor challenge - aka the Great Resignation, as workers from all walks of employment reconsider work during the pandemic - broadcast-sports audio's biggest long-term challenge continues to simmer: where is the next generation of A1s coming from?
The A1 - the lead audio mixer on sports and other live broadcasts - is considered the apex of broadcast audio's front-line field crew. But the position comes with a huge amount of responsibility and pressure: mixing a live sports broadcast watched and listened to by millions of people while being peppered with director and producer instructions. In addition, the A1 is solely responsible for making sure any system failures are fixed on the fly - often after what might have been a three- or four-hour flight and a night in a hotel before a day that might start at dawn. And that's if you don't have to build the show : oversee deployment of microphones and cabling and configure the audio console from scratch. A dwindling number of mixers want to do it.
In broadcast sports, a problem is never a problem until it becomes a crisis, says Bob Carzoli, CEO, Program Productions (PPI), a leading event-labor-management firm in the Chicago area whose portfolio includes major broadcast and regional sports networks and collegiate organizations. He estimates that the broadcast industry has lost as much as 30% of its technical workers during the COVID pandemic, including - and in particular - A1 mixers. For that highly specialized position, that's an enormous loss. You may have three or four or more A2s on a show but only one A1. And without that A1, no show.
That is literally what the broadcast-sports industry is risking right now, Carzoli warns. REMI and other remote-production efficiency techniques that networks have implemented aren't necessarily helping. He contends that they may offer some short-term cost savings but, in the long run, actually may eliminate opportunities for ambitious A2s to try out for the first chair on a low-risk game production like a college lacrosse match.
Further, live sports broadcast during COVID often made use of bubbles that corralled multiple games or even entire seasons into single locations, which reduced the need - and opportunities - for A1s. What's more, the pay differential between the two categories isn't enough to entice A2s, who see up close the enormous pressure that an A1 endures on a national broadcast, to even want to try to move up.
From Bad to Worse' For years, the broadcast-sports industry has been aware of the impending shortage of qualified A1s. In fact, under the aegis of both SVG and its subsidiary organization DTV Audio Group, an effort was started in 2015 to address the problem in conjunction with several major television networks, including ESPN and NBC Sports. It was led by Tom Sahara, who was an operations and technology exec at Turner Sports for 21 years and also served as chairman of both SVG and DTVAG industry working groups. The initiative, he says, failed for number of reasons.
Long-time operations exec Tom Sahara: The already tight staffing situations from the [corporate] acquisitions a few years prior exacerbated the talent shortage caused by the pandemic.
It got derailed by rumors of [corporate-media] acquisitions. No one wanted to start an expensive initiative as a company is being acquired, explains Sahara, who retired from Turner in 2019, a year after it was acquired by AT&T. Then, the COVID pandemic struck, which pushed many A1s to advance their retirement due to restrictions and unpleasant work environments. And the already tight staffing situations from the [corporate] acquisitions a few years prior exacerbated the talent shortage caused by the pandemic. The retirements of A1s also often coincided with the change of production teams and extended road trips due to quarantine. Working multiple games per day [as restrictions lifted] was not worth it in their minds. The shortage went from bad to worse.
Jim Budka, who has been in broadcasting since 1972 and began a career as an A1 in 1979, took a buyout from Turner Sports in 2015. However, he has kept his hand in with part-time mixing for shows produced by PGA TOUR Entertainment in St. Augustine, FL, where Budka moved after years working for Turner Sports in Atlanta. In fact, his A1 career was sparked by exactly the kind of tossed into the hot seat experience that used to be more common in broadcast: the A1 for a show he was working as an A2 didn't make it to the studio on time. That scenario is fairly rare today, given the much higher financial stakes that television sports has since acquired.
Budka says COVID exacerbated many of the issues around development of A1s: the grind of travel; the vastly greater technological complexity contemporary A1s must contend with, as the shift to IP-based infrastructure requires them to become IT experts as well as audio engineers; and A1/A2 pay differentials that many feel don't reflect the added responsibilities. On a typical show, an A1 might earn only about $50-$100 a day more than an A2 - And without all the stress the A1 has to bear, he adds.
Traditional Education Goes Only So Far In 2013, the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences (CRAS) instituted a broadcast-audio training track as part of its curriculum specifically to address a looming shortage of qualified A1s. The Tempe, AZ, school invested more than a half million dollars in its own broadcast studio and production truck, the latter able to piggyback onto broadcast networks' rigs at area sports venues for bas
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Next-Gen A1s: Broadcast Sports Faces a Supply-Chain Crisis A variety of issues spur departures, limit training and resupply By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
