Sports Are Back With a ROAR
2020 was a shock to everyone around the world. Here at The National Captioning Institute, one of the biggest surprises was how quickly our sports schedule began dropping off. For a moment, clients remained hopeful, keeping games further down the road scheduled in hopes we would quickly return to normalcy. As we all know now, that would not be the case. Almost eerily, one sports season after another passed with little to no fanfare. Even the Olympics were cautiously postponed. As entrenched as our society is in cheering for teams and filling stadiums, it was hard not to feel the impact of a large portion of our culture suddenly silent.
Sports Are Back!
We are thrilled that sports are here again! Our NCI schedule is full of soccer in Spanish and English, an unprecedented amount of College Football, Tennis, sport specialty shows, and much more. Our Baseball coverage had a huge spike in March and we are excitedly preparing for local station coverage of the Summer Tokyo Olympics. We have, probably given the sheer excitement of having options to watch again, also been asked to cover fun sports we weren’t familiar with before such as Cornhole tournaments!
NCI’s Trained Sports Captioners
NCI is known for our highly-trained, professional captioners. We’re the best at what we do. What you may not know is that not every captioner can cover sports. As this great NCRA article states, “Captioning a sporting event is just like captioning a news broadcast, right? Wrong. Sports programming offers unique challenges to the captioner, ranging from a required encyclopedic knowledge of the sport to an understanding of positioning captions to dealing with announcers fighting to get a word in edgewise.”
Each captioner who desires to take their captioning options to the next level must train on each individual sport they want to cover. It takes countless hours of research, training, and testing to be approved. That is one thing that makes NCI stand above the rest: our commitment to the best quality captioners for the specific task at hand. We are immensely proud of the work they do!
…Speaking of Watching Sports
One of the best past times is watching a game at a restaurant or bar surrounded by other fans!
We want to give a shout-out to the state of Washington for passing SB 5027. As deaffriendly so succinctly and perfectly stated:
“Concerning Closed Captioning on televisions in places of public accommodation has PASSED making Washington State the first state to require businesses to display captions on public TV sets!
Do you know what this means? If you own a business in Washington State and that business has televisions displayed (restaurants, bars, waiting rooms, hotels, etc) you’re required to have the captions on. The law specifies the captions must be on a black background with white text and a style and size of font that is readable to people with low vision.”
This is terrific news. 49 more states to go!
Book NCI For Your Next Game!
If you’d like to book one of our specialized sports captioners for your game or special, you know where to reach us!