#HL40: The Rise of HLN
By Joey Yashinsky, Horizon League Contributor. Follow on Twitter @OneSeatOver
It was the year 2002 and Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone was looking for a way to jumpstart the League’s sports coverage.
“We were frustrated with our television package,” said LeCrone, now in his 27th year at the helm of the Horizon League. “We were spending a lot of money to be syndicated in the Midwest, and I put my staff on research. What they found out was that some games over the air were generating zero ratings points. So our coaches were saying - ‘Hey, we’re on TV!’ - however, nobody was watching.”
Then fate intervened. LeCrone was on his way home one night when he decided to stop off at Butler. There was a women’s basketball game going on. And a young faculty member named John Servizzi just happened to be in the building.
“I was working on something that was relatively new at the time, which was live streaming, and this guy comes up and is incredibly interested in what I’m doing,” said Servizzi, currently the executive vice president for engineering and operations at Tupelo Raycom. “He had a suit on at a basketball game, and nobody wears a suit to a basketball game unless you’re somebody important.”
“He started going really deep: asking what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, how much it costs. By the end of the conversation, he basically asked how much it would cost to do this for 10 teams, so I threw out a number, just a wild guess. And in a way that only Jon can, he just says, ‘Done. Call me on Monday.’ He was already 100 percent behind it and ready to go without us really having introduced ourselves to each other.”
At the time, putting college sports on the Internet was not something everybody understood.
“When word started to get out that we might be trying to stream online, a colleague of mine told me if we went through with it, I was going to get fired,” LeCrone said. “And I thought, well, maybe that’s true, but if we do this the right way, every conference in America is going to want to do it, too.”
Servizzi remembers similar feelings of skepticism at the outset of the journey.
“I remember athletic directors being concerned that fewer people would buy tickets as a result of this thing being available. And it was hard to simply dismiss those concerns and say, ‘Be creative!’ when the reality was that they were all staring down major expenses and this was definitely a risk. But to use a football analogy, we knew that if we could complete this pass, some amazing things could happen.”
To the credit of administrators throughout the League, they listened to the pitch from LeCrone and Servizzi and wasted no time in giving the green light.
“I went into the room with the athletic directors and told them I’ve got this idea, but it might be a little crazy,” said LeCrone. “I told them I’d need two years to get it all done. And to my surprise, the AD’s told me, ‘This is exciting. Go do it, and do it tomorrow.’ And that was really the start of HLN and part of the energy for John Servizzi to start his own company.”
And so the Horizon League Network (HLN) was launched in 2006, becoming the very first collegiate conference with its own digital platform. In that first year, over 200 live events were streamed for free on the League’s official website.
“Initially, we were doing men’s and women’s basketball,” said Servizzi. “But there needed to be acknowledgement and recognition of all the other sports in the league. The schools led that effort in terms of getting those teams on, too. And some institutions really chose to go all in. Wright State was an early pioneer and definitely pushed us forward. Green Bay was incredibly receptive as well.”
With the Horizon League Network rolling, it wasn’t long before the worldwide leader came calling, something LeCrone had envisioned from the outset.
“I really thought if we created our own network, that would help spark some interest from ESPN to get into that space and maybe partner with us, and that’s exactly what happened. We were doing HLN before they were doing ESPN3. I told them I just wanted one thing from them, which was when the arrangement started, it should say ‘HLN on ESPN3.’ And that’s what they did.”
In 2014, the Horizon League Network officially migrated to ESPN3. Since that time, more than 600 Horizon League broadcasts have been streamed each year. In fact, for the 2017-18 athletic season, the Horizon League set all-time highs with 1.2 million viewers, who in turn consumed more than 30 million minutes of top-flight collegiate competition.
Through the Horizon League’s partnership with ESPN, the men’s basketball championship is now seen yearly on ESPN or ESPN2, with the semifinals shown on ESPNU. Early rounds of Motor City Madness are streamed on ESPN+. The women’s championship game is broadcast live on ESPNU.
“The thing is, now we don’t have to worry about a window,” said LeCrone. “We can have 10, 15 games on at a time. You don’t have to get squeezed into one TV slot. In my opinion, it has absolutely revolutionized live content distribution in conferences outside of the Power Five. John Servizzi and his team deserve all the credit in the world.”
It was a match made in heaven, all due to a chance meeting at Hinkle Fieldhouse nearly 20 years ago where a guy in a suit found a guy in a baseball hat who had somehow figured out how to take a live basketball game and put it on the Internet.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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