Our company, Aardvark Video was started in 1987 in Pleasantville, NY, and then moved to Las Vegas, NV in 2001.
High School sports were very big while we were in NY with many of the athletics moving on to play football, baseball, basketball, tennis, soccer, or Lacrosse in college.
In NY, we had several contracts with school athletic directors recording games and often practices. Just like professional teams, the coaches used the video to improve their teams. Often, they had us record other teams’ games for scouting.
What were the results?
Was this successful, I’ll say! Most of the teams we recorded went on to win the division and often state title. I recall being bused to state championships held in college stadiums.
The way the contracts worked, our video production cost the school nothing and for every game, the player’s parents would get a copy of the video. The parents were required to buy the whole season of copies to pay for the videos.
As an added bonus with all the footage we shot of the high school athletes, we had a wealth of full games and highlights to send to college recruiters. We made dozens of “College Scholarship” videos for these high school athletes and helped many of them get scholarships, full and partial as the best result and sometimes just helped them get admitted to universities.
How was Sports Video Scene in Nevada?
When we moved to Nevada in the early 2000s, we found at that time that the schools and athletes hadn’t reached the video sophistication level that was in NY and they didn’t have the budgets or inclination to organize parents to buy copies. There wasn’t YouTube or Facebook and video really wasn’t as prolific as in NY. Calls from athletes and schools were not coming to us as often.
We had the equipment, experience, and skills and produced experience and marketing videos for the local arena football team at the time, The Gladiators.
Through the years, we’ve recorded teams and players that came to the area for soccer and basketball tournaments, helping many athletes get scholarships as well as have a record of their experience.
What Have We Done for Athletes Recently?
Recently we did a series of videos for a Wheelchair Basketball Player that came to a two-day tournament aimed at helping him get a contract with a European team.
We also recorded the experiences of a two-day tournament for a flag football team from Colorado this year and produced a dynamic highlight reel. This is something the athletes will treasure for a lifetime.
Sports Video in Las Vegas Today
Today, all the Las Vegas professional sports teams have in-house video departments, and though we may do projects for teams that come out here such as working recently for the Pittsburgh Steelers during the NFL draft, with the wealth of video equipment readily available and reasonable competency level of parents recording we are seeing the use of video becoming more and more prolific and seeing more and more footage online.
