Part II: Initial programming, COVID-19 challenges, and more

Right from the start, ACCN was notable for documentaries, docuseries, and content featuring prominent coaches. [Aaron] Katzman, ACCN’s coordinating producer from 2019-2023, said those were both important early focuses.

“With the success and depth of the conference, there’s so many different storylines that you can go with and that we were able to find unique ways to celebrate. Prior to the launch of the network, we were able to do a roundtable show with championship-winning coaches that included Muffet McGraw, Coach K, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, Dabo Sweeney. That’s a Mount Rushmore of coaches, and we sat them down and turned it into a show early on in the network’s launch.

“We’ve done documentaries on programs, like all-access with the women’s lacrosse program as they were getting up and going at Pitt. We’ve done stuff with the football programs, inside access throughout the summer and fall. So again, it’s ways to celebrate and to to tell the stories of the student-athletes and the programs that may not be talked about on a SportsCenter or another ESPN platform, but deserve just as much of the success and just as much of the recognition.”

[ESPN senior director of programming and acquisitions Jeramy] Michiaels, who came over to ACCN in 2021, said all of ESPN’s networks faced challenges in 2020 and 2021 around the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was particularly impressive how the relatively-new ACCN handled that from both programming and business standpoints.

“It’s amazing: with the headwinds that everybody faced in 2020 and 2021, with the ACC network launching in August of 2019, the network didn’t even have one full year to get through before COVID really sidetracked everything.  And I would like to call it the power of ESPN and the power of the ACC brand helping push through all of those headwinds, including achieving full distribution in 2021.

“This is a wildly successful network, not just from a revenue standpoint, but just from an exposure standpoint for all 28 sports in the ACC, all of the student-athletes that get time not only on ACC Network, but also [accompanying digital network] ACC Network Extra.

“And it was really just having the the brand power of the ACC and ESPN to be able to kind of forge through all of the headwinds, not only with COVID but also with a landscape where we needed full distribution. And in December of 2021, the ACC Network became fully distributed and is available on every provider across the country. So that was something that was really powerful to have happen in the in the face of all of those headwinds.”

Michiaels credited the work of his Disney colleagues for getting them that full distribution.

“Well, our platform distribution team at the Walt Disney Company is second-to-none. It is the group of the smartest people that I’ve ever been around. And the way that they package not only ACC Network, but all the Walt Disney Company properties, is really, truly amazing. It also extends over to our sales team as well, in being able to not only sell corporate sponsorships but sell ads across the network. We really have the best in business when it comes to platform distribution and ad sales.”

Katzman said there were huge impacts from the pandemic on the programming side as well, but the network quickly rolled with it.

“When COVID hit, it impacted all the big-picture planning: we had these sort of long-range plans and goals, but no one anticipates a pandemic. So that threw things for a loop for sure, but also allowed us to become creative in the way we approached other programming.”

“I vividly remember during COVID, we created a show that no one else was was doing yet, TV of a Zoom roundtable with every football coach in the conference. And we had two hosts on Zoom boxes from their homes and each coach on a Zoom box from their own home, and it it became a 30-minute or one-hour show. It was just those sorts of things: even though we had plans and ideas and goals, we also were adaptable and and able to adjust on the fly and create new programming at the drop of a hat.”

Katzman said an early notable element for ACCN (which also helped during the COVID years) was each school’s investment in technology and on-campus broadcast facilities. And he said that’s become a model elsewhere.

“On the live event side of things, our school production facilities were sort of transcendent in the way that the schools were able to produce live events. And that has become what other conferences now strive to do. And the ACC has such a great mix of schools, and buy-in from production leads at each school, that we were able to work with them to produce live event content that again now has become kind of the way programming works on the live event side in a lot of ways.”

He added that those on-school facilities and staffers helped the network editorially as well.

“In addition to that, it’s almost like having boots on the ground and ears on the ground at each campus. So we were able to, with our counterparts at each school, develop relationships. The documentaries or the feature stories that we were able to tell in different ACC Network shows and different ACC Network programming, a lot of those ideas were coming directly from a school production person saying, ‘Hi, I produced a softball game and came across this story of this player that I thought was really cool.’ They would pass it along, and that could turn into something for the network. So all of those factors, as we were launching, really helped develop the network and what the network was going to be.”

Katzman said the initial focus was just making sure they could have a workable launch.

“We started the network and our goal was to be on the air. I mean that quite literally, going from nothing to having a network, it’s not an easy undertaking. So we wanted to make sure we we were able to get the the nuts and bolts of programming on the air and do it as well as we could do it it. And that included all of our shows, all of our live events. And then we had plans of how how the network would evolve.”

But he said things quickly evolved from there.

“We added maybe after a year or so of the network a more personality-driven show that we kept on the air for a little while called In Play, and we added more football programming, and we started to take some of our shows on the road more, our football show, our basketball shows, our Packer and Durham morning show. So we started with kind of a baseline of ‘Let’s get the basics done very well and then let’s branch out from there.’

Read on for more on the member schools’ relationships with ACCN.