William McCormack, Contributing Photographer

On the first Monday morning of November, as most students were waking up for the new week and walking into dining halls for breakfast, the Yale men’s basketball team stepped onto its home court floor dressed in full game night attire. Arena lights at the John J. Lee Amphitheater emitted a faint blue hue.

The occasion was a preseason video shoot, and the final product — a pregame stadium video that plays before the announcement of Yale’s starting lineup — debuted publicly for the first time last Tuesday night when Yale hosted Vassar in its season opener.

Lee Amphitheater, the cathedral-like home to Yale’s varsity basketball, volleyball and gymnastics programs, hosted its first game of basketball in December 1932, making it one of the 10 oldest active Division I college basketball arenas. Over the course of the pandemic, JLA underwent a series of upgrades that now enable 21st-century perks like pregame video and gametime graphics in the nearly century-old facility.

Athletic administrators organized a repainting of its interior, upgraded overhead lighting in summer 2020, added a new LED scorer’s table and installed twin video boards on each baseline this past August, according to Yale’s Associate Athletic Director of Facilities and Operations Danielle Upham.

When returners on the Yale men’s team started basketball practice again this fall, the arena additions created a new atmosphere for sessions in the gym, said guard Michael Feinberg ’23. The upgrades made their first appearance during the start of Yale’s volleyball season earlier this semester before setting the backdrop for three basketball games last week. 

“With the new technology, the new screen, the new lights, the whole setup just felt completely renovated,” Feinberg said. “It’s felt completely different [than] in past years. Having those bright lights, you just feel like you’re in a game at all times. You feel like you’re in an NBA stadium or some sort of professional arena playing in front of thousands and thousands of fans.”

Brighter lights: “It was like the sun rose”

The lights are likely to stand out most to anyone strolling into Lee Amphitheater for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly ended the 2019–20 college basketball season. In an email to the News, Upham said Cooper Lighting Solutions supplied the new arena lighting, the Ephesus Lumadapt 8 LED. The new set, which can change colors, illuminates an arena interior that has also been sharpened with fresh paint. 

Brad Ahern, Yale Athletics’ director of creative services and digital strategy, did not start working with the University until August but had firsthand experience with the amphitheater’s old lighting. Back in 2019, when Lee Amphitheater hosted the Ivy League’s postseason basketball tournament, Ivy Madness, Ahern worked the event as a freelance creative shooting photos and video for Harvard.

“One thing I remembered from being in there was the lighting and how difficult it was to white balance my shots,” Ahern said. “The old lighting was kind of flickering and it had this little orange-y and green tint to it.”

Ahern called the new set of brighter lighting a “game-changer” when it comes to video and photography.

The new lighting also made an impression on Yale men’s basketball head coach James Jones, who has led practices in JLA since taking the program over in 1999 and served as an assistant coach from 1995 to 1997. Yale practices in both the Payne Whitney Gym’s Lanman Center and its home court in the Lee Amphitheater. On a rainy October day, the team practiced in both facilities.  

“It was a dark, gloomy day,” Jones recalled in a preseason interview with the News. “We started in Lanman and then I walked in JLA. It was like the sun rose.” Jones was so amazed by the difference that he fired off a text to the donor of the project to thank him again. 

By the time Yale hosted its season opener last week, guard and captain Jalen Gabbidon ’22 said the team was fully adjusted to playing on the brighter court.

“If you’re in a dark room, you get used to it,” he said as an analogy. “Hopefully for Harvard,” he added jokingly, “they got thrown off by it, people who aren’t used to that.”

Video boards bring introduction clips, gametime graphics and a dance cam to JLA

The new lights set the tone for the pregame hype video that appears on the Lee Amphitheater’s other big addition: the video displays. Upham said that sports display and creative services company Nevco, the firm that also facilitated the installation of video boards at the Yale Bowl and Reese Stadium in recent years, handled the new video displays and LED scorer’s table.

Nevco’s Director of Sports Video Jeff Besserman told the News the video displays each measure 9.83 feet by 18.02 feet. Besserman, who also led the video board project at the Yale Bowl, said he had visited the John J. Lee Amphitheater four to six times — Nevco started looking at the arena when the company was executing the Bowl project in 2019. Besserman added that Dan Schneider, a display and scoring consultant for Nevco in the northeast, had visited JLA at least a dozen times while planning for the project and was in attendance for the men’s basketball opener last Tuesday night.

“We did a lot of prelim work, so when the time was right to move forward with the project, we were already well educated and ready to go,” Besserman said in a phone interview with the News.

Besserman said Yale was looking for 3.9 millimeter video that “allows for super clarity.” Since another level of Payne Whitney Gym sits above the ceiling of the Lee Amphitheater, as opposed to opening up to the sky like a roof, he said adding a “centerhung” board that drops down from the ceiling “did not make any kind of sense” in terms of Yale’s budget. He declined to share the athletic department’s budget for the project. Besserman added that Nevco also helped upgrade the gym’s broadcast control room and continues to work with Yale on graphics for the video boards.

During the season’s first basketball games last week, those graphics included an electronic scoreboard that showed the game’s score alongside key details like lineups on the floor, the points and fouls those players had accrued and each team’s foul count. The two displays also hosted in-game content ranging from gametime graphics like “Let’s go, Yale” after a big shot to a “Dance Cam” that showcased fans, mostly Yale students, moving to music during a timeout.

Before tipoff, the lights turn dark and blue for the introduction of Yale’s starting lineup, and fans turn to watch the result of creative services director Ahern’s video shoot. Ahern — who helped coordinate the video shoot with Matt Elkin, the men’s program’s director of basketball operations, and Nathalie Carter, Yale’s senior associate athletic director for community engagement and DEI — said he set the lights to blue while capturing footage to complement Yale’s athletic brand and enhance the visual effect of shooting introduction videos in a dark arena. 

On the morning of the shoot, players cycled through three stations. Ahern captured what he called “gladiator shots” — in which players might cross their arms or handle a basketball while pointing into the camera — at an on-court station. In the second station, a green screen in the locker room set the backdrop for individual player graphics. Finally, a question and answer station recorded footage for in-game fan engagement videos during timeouts and stoppages in play. Jones said Elkin told him that some players were doing curls in the locker room beforehand in anticipation of the “gladiator shots.”

“I think you got to appeal to basically everyone in the arena,” Ahern said when asked about how he views the purpose of a pregame hype video. “You got to appeal to the fans, the students and especially the student-athletes, coaches. I think everyone is hyped up for the game in some way, but I feel like the venue content can really be make or break on the whole atmosphere of the game … [You] get the blood flowing, just get everyone locked in.”

Ahern said they collectively captured around 60 minutes of footage during the video shoot, and he used Adobe Creative Cloud to produce a pregame hype video of about 30 to 45 seconds. He pairs videos to music through a partnership with music licensing company APM Music. Ahern said he hopes to incorporate energetic game highlights, like fastbreak dunks or key blocks, into future iterations.

Branding a basketball program in the age of social media

The video perks that the Lee Amphitheater’s revamp allows align with a larger departmental emphasis on branding since Yale Director of Athletics Vicky Chun assumed her role in summer 2018. Ahern’s role as director of creative services and digital strategy did not exist until Chun hired Nina Lindberg for the new position in February 2019.

To junior guard Feinberg, aesthetics play an important role in college athletics recruiting.

“When you’re a high-school kid and you can’t spend ten hours or weeks in our shoes actually being here to experience it, it’s all about the perception of the experience,” Feinberg said. “Having these little gizmos, gadgets, cool little things to highlight how special we are — it’s a very good visual representation of the experience, and once you come here, you’re actually pleasantly surprised to find out it’s way more than meets the eye.” 

Fenberg said players realize that “it’s about the culture of the team, the coaching staff, the winning history, the level of excellence” when they finally arrive on campus.

Into his 22nd season and 23rd year leading the Yale program, Jones has witnessed the emergence of social media over his career as head coach. He said he considers social media “a necessary evil” — a great positive when used the right way but a tool that also enables “a lot of bad and evil.” He recalled a talk that professor of psychology and Head of Silliman College Laurie Santos gave to the men’s basketball team earlier this fall during which she discussed how social media can be harmful when young people scroll through curated moments of their friends’ “perfect” lives.

When asked whether he saw the pregame hype video as a tool for recruiting or a merely a perk for the current roster, Jones, who is inactive on Twitter but started posting on Instagram in 2018 with the encouragement of his former Director of Basketball Operations Rey Crossman, said he views it as “a little of both.”

“Social media, whether you like it or not, is here to stay,” he said. “I know that the young people in our program and on our campus … for them to be able to share that stuff on social media in terms of their excitement about being at Yale and playing basketball, I think it’s a wonderful thing.”

The Yale men’s program is playing on the road this week at Siena and Vermont, while the Yale women’s squad is back in the revamped John J. Lee Amphitheater Friday night to host Maine.