THE GAME IS EVERYWHERE: How Streaming Changed College Sports
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
On a Saturday night in Huntsville, Texas, a Sam Houston football game can be local and national at the same time.
The stadium sits far from the country’s largest television production centers.
The broadcasters, camera operators and production staff may have connections to Huntsville, Houston and the surrounding region.
Yet when the game begins, their work can be distributed through an ESPN platform to eligible subscribers far beyond Huntsville.
That combination was much harder to achieve not that long ago.
Before streaming became a major part of college sports, programs outside the largest conferences often depended on regional television, local radio and school-operated webcasts for much of their exposure.
National television opportunities existed, but television had an unavoidable limitation: There were only so many hours available.
ESPN+ helped change that.
When ESPN+ launched on April 12, 2018, ESPN executives specifically described one of its intended audiences as fans who had limited access to teams they cared about—including alumni whose schools might otherwise receive little television exposure.
The service launched with thousands of college events across numerous conferences.
Eight years later, that idea has reshaped a substantial part of college sports.
Television Had A Scarcity Problem
ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and other traditional networks have only 24 hours in a day.
College athletics does not.
Football, basketball, volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball and other sports frequently overlap across hundreds of campuses.
Traditional television forces networks to choose which events receive a channel.
Streaming created another shelf.
Conference USA’s ESPN agreement makes more than 450 live sporting events available through ESPN+ and ESPN3, including substantial inventories beyond football and men’s basketball.
The West Coast Conference offers an even larger example.
Its agreement with ESPN places more than 900 conference events each year on ESPN+, covering basketball, soccer, volleyball, water polo, baseball and softball.
The model was apparent from ESPN+’s beginning.
The Ivy League agreement announced just before the platform launched called for more than 1,100 conference events annually, with the majority distributed through ESPN+.
None of this means a Tuesday-night volleyball match suddenly attracts the audience of a Saturday SEC football game.
Streaming did not erase college athletics’ hierarchy.
What it changed was availability.
A game does not necessarily need one of a small number of national television windows simply to reach viewers beyond its local market.
The school can remain where it is.
The game can remain where it is.
The distribution can travel.
Huntsville Shows How The Model Evolved
Sam Houston provides a useful case study because its digital-broadcast history predates ESPN+.
Bearkat Sports Network began streaming Sam Houston sporting events annually in 2008 under the guidance of Jason Barfield.
By 2016, he was helping transition Sam Houston’s operation toward live ESPN productions.
The university later built production facilities that include a television and podcast studio and a central control room connected to multiple athletic venues.
By 2024, Bearkat Sports Network said it was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions annually, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is no longer simply a school putting a radio call or basic video stream online.
It is local production infrastructure feeding a nationally distributed sports platform.
Barfield’s career illustrates what that can mean for the worker.
Before joining Sam Houston, he served as sports editor of The Huntsville Item.
He has called Bearkat baseball and soccer, worked football and basketball radio and handled both play-by-play and analyst roles on ESPN productions.
He did not have to leave Huntsville for his work to travel beyond Huntsville.
That may be one of streaming’s least-discussed effects.
The Worker Did Not Always Have To Move Either
For generations, one familiar route through sports media was geographical.
Start in a smaller market.
Develop a résumé.
Move to a larger market.
Then move again.
Maybe, eventually, reach a national platform.
That ladder still exists.
But streaming has expanded another route: sports-media professionals can gain experience on nationally distributed platforms without necessarily having to leave the markets where they built their careers.
Consider Rosie Langello.
Langello joined WSFA in Montgomery in January 2022 and became the station’s first female sports director.
In 2026, she moved into a primary news-anchor role.
She has also worked Troy football sidelines on ESPN+.
When Sam Houston opened its 2026 season at Troy, the ESPN+ crew featured Will Kollmeyer on play-by-play, Ben Stanfield as analyst and Langello reporting from the sideline.
That is an important distinction.
She does not have to choose between a regional television career in Alabama and participating in ESPN-distributed college sports.
She can do both.
Experience Can Travel In The Other Direction, Too
Will Kollmeyer represents another pathway.
Long before the current streaming era, Kollmeyer had already spent 18 years as sports director at WTVA in Tupelo, Mississippi, more than three years as sports director at WCBI and a decade working in public relations, marketing, sports information and broadcasting at Itawamba Community College.
When the SEC Network launched in 2014, Ole Miss selected Kollmeyer as one of its local play-by-play voices for locally produced network broadcasts.
More than a decade later, he remains part of the ESPN college-sports ecosystem, including that 2026 Troy-Sam Houston ESPN+ assignment.
His career shows that streaming does not merely create opportunities for newcomers.
It can also give experienced regional broadcasters another outlet for decades of accumulated knowledge.
A Student Can Now Enter The Same System
Then there is Gavan Baxley.
Baxley grew up attending Troy football games and later studied broadcast journalism at the university.
In October 2025, while still a senior, he went from watching Troy football from the stands to reporting from the sideline on ESPN+.
He graduated in spring 2026 with a degree in broadcast journalism and remained at Troy as an athletics broadcasting graduate assistant.
By September, Troy was identifying him in that role while he produced football previews and other athletics content.
That may be one of the clearest examples of how dramatically the entry point has changed.
A student in Troy, Alabama, can learn how to prepare for a live college broadcast, work with a production crew and gain experience on an ESPN platform before beginning the traditional sequence of professional-market moves.
Streaming did not eliminate the apprenticeship.
It brought the apprenticeship closer to the national distribution system.
Regional Television And ESPN Can Overlap
Randy McIlvoy adds another wrinkle.
McIlvoy is sports director at Houston’s KPRC 2 and continues to perform college play-by-play work for Rice, Houston and Sam Houston through university broadcast platforms.
His career also includes regional television work predating the modern streaming era.
On Sept. 19, 2026, McIlvoy called Sam Houston’s home football game against Nicholls on ESPN+ with John Harris and sideline reporter Kendra Sheehan.
At the same time, Jason Barfield and Brian Adams handled the Bearkat Sports Network radio broadcast, which was also available locally on KSHU 90.5 FM.
One game.
Multiple crews.
Local radio.
A university network.
A Houston television sports director.
National streaming.
That is the modern college-sports media ecosystem in miniature.
It also shows why this story is bigger than simply saying workers in small towns no longer need to leave.
Streaming has blurred the boundaries among local, regional and national work.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
Richmond Offers Another Version
Eastern Kentucky shows the same transformation from a different angle.
Wes Chandler spent 14 years working within the EKU Sports Network before being promoted in August 2026 to lead play-by-play responsibilities for football and men’s basketball.
Maggie Davis followed another path.
Davis is an anchor, reporter and producer for BBN Tonight at Lexington’s WLEX-TV.
She joined the EKU Sports Network in 2025-26 and has worked play-by-play, color analysis and sideline assignments across multiple sports.
In September 2026, Davis joined Chandler and Terry Johnson on the ESPN+ broadcast of Eastern Kentucky’s football game against Dayton.
Again, she did not have to abandon regional television to participate in nationally distributed college sports.
The jobs can overlap.
That is becoming the point.
The Old Ladder Is Becoming A Network
Taken together, these careers do not follow one pattern.
Barfield built his career within a university and local media ecosystem.
Langello combines regional television with ESPN+ sideline work.
Kollmeyer brought decades of local and regional broadcasting experience into ESPN-distributed college broadcasts.
Baxley gained ESPN+ experience before graduating and moved into a university broadcasting role.
Davis works in Lexington television while contributing to Eastern Kentucky broadcasts.
McIlvoy remains the sports director of a major-market television station while continuing college play-by-play work.
That diversity may be more important than any single résumé.
The modern sports-media career increasingly looks less like one ladder and more like a network of overlapping roles—broadcasting, local television, university media, digital production, freelance work, podcasts, social media and national streaming.
One person may participate in several of them.
ESPN+ Is Now Part Of An Even Larger Streaming System
The distribution infrastructure has continued to evolve.
ESPN’s current Unlimited offering provides access to its full suite of networks and services, and ESPN says the platform contains more than 47,000 live events annually.
Meanwhile, the ESPN+ library is now included in the ESPN Select offering.
ESPN content has also been integrated into Disney+.
Disney says subscribers with ESPN Select, ESPN Unlimited or qualifying bundles can access ESPN programming within Disney+. ESPN Select includes the ESPN+ library, while subscribers without an ESPN subscription receive only a curated sampling of ESPN content.
Individual events can also be affected by rights and blackout restrictions.
That distinction matters when discussing scale.
In Disney’s last detailed subscriber disclosure, the company reported 131.6 million Disney+ subscribers worldwide as of Sept. 27, 2025.
That does not mean 131.6 million people can watch a particular Sam Houston, Troy or Eastern Kentucky event.
The number describes the scale of the broader Disney+ ecosystem—not the addressable audience for an individual ESPN+ game.
But the evolution still matters.
A college sporting event produced in Huntsville, Troy or Richmond can now exist within a streaming environment connected to one of the world’s largest entertainment companies.
That is a radically different distribution environment from the one smaller college programs inhabited two decades ago.
Local Media Did Not Disappear
There is an easy mistake to make when telling this story.
National streaming did not eliminate local sports media.
If anything, the new environment makes the distinction between game distribution and community coverage clearer.
A national platform can carry the competition.
A local radio station can deliver a hometown call.
A university media operation can produce interviews, podcasts and highlights.
Local newspapers and independent digital publications can cover the coaches, athletes, facilities, attendance, recruiting and institutional decisions surrounding the program.
Social media can redistribute all of it again.
Sam Houston’s Nicholls broadcast illustrated several of those layers operating simultaneously: ESPN+ carried the game, Bearkat Sports Network produced its separate radio call, and KSHU provided an over-the-air local outlet.
Those platforms do not necessarily replace one another.
They perform different jobs.
ESPN can distribute the competition.
Local media can explain why the competition matters.
Small Market No Longer Has To Mean Small Reach
Streaming has not made Conference USA equal to the SEC.
It has not erased the financial differences between conferences.
It has not guaranteed large audiences for every game.
And it has not eliminated the advantages of working in Houston, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles or another major media center.
But those are not the only ways to measure what changed.
ESPN+ helped weaken one of the basic limitations facing college sports outside the biggest conferences: Television could not carry everything.
Once that limitation weakened, another boundary weakened with it.
A broadcaster could build ESPN production experience in Huntsville.
A Montgomery television journalist could work the sideline in Troy.
A Lexington broadcaster could add Eastern Kentucky games to her portfolio.
A veteran Houston sports director could call a Sam Houston game on ESPN+ while another crew delivered the hometown radio broadcast.
And a college student could stand on an ESPN+ sideline before his professional career had even fully begun.
The games never stopped being local.
The communities never stopped mattering.
But the ceiling on how far the games—and the work behind them—could travel became much higher.
The game did not have to move.
The worker did not necessarily have to move.
The distribution did.
And that may be one of the most consequential changes ESPN+ brought to college sports beyond the power conferences.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
The Game Is Everywhere: Who Is Left to Cover It?
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
High school and small-college sports are easier to watch, track and discuss than they were a generation ago.
But as traditional newsrooms continue cutting sports staffs, more content does not necessarily mean more independent journalism.
On a Friday night, the stadium can still be full.
Parents check scores on their phones.
Players post highlights before leaving the parking lot.
Coaches communicate directly with their communities.
Fans who cannot attend may be able to stream the game from home.
The underlying activity has not disappeared.
High school sports recorded 8,415,684 participation entries during the 2025-26 school year, another all-time high and an increase of 149,440 from the previous year.
The National Federation of State High School Associations compiles those figures through its member state associations, making the total a broad measure of participation across American high school athletics.
There are also more ways to follow those athletes than previous generations had.
Scores update quickly. Highlights circulate across social platforms.
Schools can produce broadcasts themselves.
Streaming has made thousands of games available beyond the communities where they are played.
The games are increasingly visible.
Yet another part of the local sports ecosystem is shrinking.
The independent reporter in the press box.
The games remain. Many of the jobs do not.
The change became particularly visible again this fall.
On Oct. 1, multiple USA TODAY Co. sports staffers publicly announced that their positions had been eliminated.
Akeem Glaspie had been covering Butler basketball.
Michael Chavez said the company eliminated his position covering Mississippi high school sports.
Sherlon Christie, a senior trending editor, announced his departure after 22 years with the company.
The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear.
Only weeks earlier, McClatchy eliminated a majority of the positions in the Lexington Herald-Leader newsroom.
The cuts included three sports reporters, according to Kentucky Public Radio.
Those departures matter for reasons that extend beyond the number of jobs lost.
For generations, the local sports reporter was part of the infrastructure surrounding a community’s teams.
The reporter knew the schools.
The coaches.
The administrators.
The rivalries.
The history behind why one game mattered more than another.
Over years, that person might watch an athlete become a coach, an assistant become a head coach or a struggling program become a contender.
That kind of institutional knowledge is difficult to replace with a scoreboard.
This is bigger than the sports department
What is happening in press boxes reflects a much larger transformation in local journalism.
Nearly 40 percent of local U.S. newspapers have disappeared since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative.
More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have been lost over that period, a decline of more than 75 percent.
Across journalism occupations more broadly, employment fell a little more than 7 percent from 2023 to 2024.
Digital publishing has not simply recreated the economics that supported those newsrooms.
Medill examined web traffic at 100 of the country’s largest newspaper sites and found that their average monthly pageviews declined by more than 45 percent over four years.
Only 11 of the 100 recorded growth during that period.
At the same time, local journalism itself has not disappeared.
In 2005, newspapers employed 71 percent of U.S. reporters.
By 2024, that share had fallen to 29 percent, while digital media and broadcast reporting each accounted for roughly a quarter of journalism employment.
That distinction matters.
The story is not simply that journalism is disappearing.
Where journalism happens is changing.
More content is not the same thing as more journalism
That becomes particularly important in sports.
A high school can livestream its football game.
That is useful.
A university can produce an ESPN+ broadcast.
That is useful too.
A coach can post highlights.
A parent can upload video.
A recruiting service can track prospects.
An independent creator can operate a podcast, newsletter or YouTube channel.
A school can distribute its own interviews, statistics and behind-the-scenes content.
Each can add something valuable to the sports-media ecosystem.
But they do not necessarily perform the same function.
A team’s social account represents the team.
An athletic department’s media operation represents the institution.
A recruiting service serves a particular audience.
A streaming platform primarily distributes the competition.
Independent journalism serves another purpose.
Someone still needs to ask why a decision was made.
Someone needs to provide context when something changes.
Someone needs to verify conflicting accounts rather than merely repeat them.
Someone needs to cover athletes, coaches and institutions as more than statistics, recruiting rankings or highlight clips.
And sometimes the most important story has little to do with the final score.
Streaming solved one problem while exposing another
Small-college sports provides one of the clearest examples of the tension.
Technology solved much of the old distribution problem.
Sam Houston offers a useful case study.
In 2008, Jason Barfield was leading the operation that became Bearkat Sports Network, which was streaming more than 60 Sam Houston sporting events annually.
In 2016, he began transitioning live-event production toward ESPN.
The operation continued to grow.
By 2024, Sam Houston said Bearkat Sports Network was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions each year, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is genuine progress.
A game produced in Huntsville, Texas, no longer has to remain primarily a Huntsville experience.
But Bearkat Sports Network and ESPN serve different purposes from The Huntsville Item or an independent journalist covering Sam Houston.
One can show the game.
Another may need to report independently on the institution, its decisions and the people around the program.
Those roles can coexist.
Ideally, they should.
The danger comes when growth in the first category creates the impression that the second is no longer necessary.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
The patchwork is replacing the old model
The future of local sports media is unlikely to belong to one type of organization.
Traditional newspapers remain part of it.
So do television and radio.
But coverage increasingly can come from independent digital publications, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, photographers, school broadcasts, university media operations and individual creators.
There are advantages to that fragmentation.
A reporter who loses a newspaper position no longer needs another newspaper to grant permission to keep reporting.
A broadcaster can create a podcast.
A photographer can build a direct relationship with an audience.
A journalist with deep knowledge of one conference, school or region can build a specialized publication around an audience that a larger outlet considers too small.
The barriers to publishing have fallen dramatically.
The cost of sustained original reporting has not fallen nearly as far.
Travel costs money.
Covering teams every week takes time.
Building sources can take years.
Public-records work requires patience and expertise.
Attending games, practices, press conferences, school-board meetings and community events requires somebody to show up.
Someone still has to fund that work.
That is the unresolved problem.
AI makes the distinction even sharper
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the economic challenge.
Routine sports information is particularly easy to summarize: Scores. Schedules. Standings. Statistics.
Basic game results.
A reader increasingly may be able to obtain those answers without visiting the publication that originally gathered or organized the information.
Medill identified the integration of generative AI into search engines as an additional challenge for publishers, noting that users can increasingly encounter summarized information before reaching the underlying source.
The decline of local journalism began long before generative AI, so AI should not be treated as the cause of that decades-long contraction.
It is another pressure on an already disrupted business model.
That makes commodity information harder to build a business around.
But it may make another category of journalism more valuable: information that does not exist until someone reports it.
AI can summarize a press conference once a recording, transcript or report exists.
It can search documents, compare information and identify patterns.
It can help journalists organize research, test claims and work more efficiently.
But it does not eliminate the need for the sourcing and firsthand reporting that put new information into the record.
Local knowledge that has never entered that record still has to be sourced, verified and reported.
The easier existing information becomes to summarize and redistribute, the more valuable original sourcing, verification and local context can become.
That creates an opportunity, too
The decline of the old model does not necessarily mean the end of local sports journalism.
It may mean its business structure has to change.
Independent publishers could become part of the answer.
So could memberships.
Subscriptions.
Sponsorships.
Nonprofit newsrooms.
Local radio partnerships.
Newsletters.
Podcasts.
Specialized digital publications.
No single model is guaranteed to replace what newspapers once supported.
But the migration of journalism employment beyond newspapers demonstrates that the profession itself is already adapting.
Broadcast and digital media now employ substantial shares of U.S. journalists even as newspaper employment continues to contract.
The challenge is ensuring that the new structure can financially support enough people to do original reporting consistently.
There is still something to cover
The audience has not vanished.
More than 8.4 million high school sports participation entries were recorded during the 2025-26 school year.
Thousands of schools stream events.
College programs outside the largest conferences can place games on national digital platforms.
Athletes can communicate directly with fans.
Communities can follow teams from almost anywhere.
Technology has made the competition dramatically easier to see.
That is worth celebrating.
But visibility alone does not create journalism.
A community can have livestreams, highlights, statistics, podcasts and hundreds of social-media posts about its teams while still losing something important if nobody is being paid to independently follow those teams week after week.
The future therefore presents two different questions.
The first has largely been answered: How do we make the games easier to see?
Technology solved much of that problem.
The harder question remains: Who is going to keep showing up to report what happens around them?
Because the game can be everywhere.
That does not automatically mean the journalism will be.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
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