I first noticed ESPN when I was in high school in the 80s, on my way to Lake Compounce amusement park (more or less across the street) to see the likes of Richard Marx, the Club MTV tour, Sting and the comedian Gallagher. Two of my Rockville High School classmates accepted jobs at ESPN after college, but I never dreamed I would work here.
Fast forward to 1994, I graduated from UCONN School of Business and was employed by a software consulting company who landed me my first assignment at ESPN. My first impressions of ESPN in 1995:
1. Are you kidding me? My desk will be in a double-wide trailer?
2. With no plumbing?
3. Why are there plastic bugs in my desk drawer? Oh, I get it… geek joke.
4. I can’t wait until my contract is up.
Now, 16 years, 7 jobs, 10 desks, 2 apartments, 2 houses, 1 husband and 2 babies later, I’m happy to say my first impressions didn’t last.
In my current role, technology division communications, I produce internal communications to market technology tools and initiatives and work to engage our technology employees across communications platforms. I’m a proud member of the Technology group and I look forward to sharing our division’s work with you.
Technology at ESPN encompasses many disciplines, including the normal IT functions you find at every company:
software development (where I started my career), support services, voice communications, data communications, infrastructure, data center operations, project management.
Where ESPN Technology takes a unique spin is in media engineering, content distribution, fiber transport, satellite transmissions, innovation and product development. Blend these groups together, and you have yourself a one-of-a-kind world-class Technology organization and it includes maintaining…wait for it….a Farm!
One of ESPN’s, and therefore Bristol’s,(editor’s note: Our mistake, our Farm is actually in the fine town of Southington, we’ve been calling Bristol home for so long that it slipped our minds that we’ve actaully crossed the border!) biggest landmarks is the terraced teleport antenna “farm.” In Technology, we seem to have more than our fair share of private aviation enthusiasts, so we’re always able to get some nice aerial shots of it. It wasn’t always so pretty though. Antennas at ESPN were anywhere and everywhere we could put them – on roofs, in parking lots, scattered about the campus. In 2009, our Transmission team completed an 18-month project to relocate them to their new home where 23 antennas are positioned across 4 separate tiers on 10 acres, with a fifth tier for future expansion.
ESPN’s teleport is award-winning, as is the transmission operations center in the adjacent, lucky Building 13. These facilities make up the nerve center for sending and receiving every satellite and fiber feed in and out of ESPN, to game sites and back, and ultimately into viewer homes.
That’s how we connect to our audience; learn how we stay connected with our offices around the globe the next time we meet!
