THE FOLLOWING IS A NEWS-GAZETTE STORY BY JENNIFER BAILEY
The new Watchfire video scoreboard was installed earlier this week at Danville High School
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DANVILLE — Installation of the new outdoor video scoreboard at Danville High School means new technological bells and whistles for the students and staff.
Mark Bacys, facilitator of district athletics for Danville School District 118, said the new 34-feet-by-20-feet video board and scoreboard is quite impressive, to replace the former traditional scoreboard at Ned Whitesell Field.
“It will have more content and advertising,” Bacys said.
He said they’re in the process of working with the Channel 1 multimedia class students to streamline some of what they do and work on, for school announcements and other news items, to transfer those items to the board.
Bacys said DHS also is looking at creating a new class, sports marketing, for promotions, creating media and other aspects utilizing the board too.
The video board will have the ability to show instant replays for sports events. There will be additional workers for the cameras, he said.
“The possibilities are really endless on our end,” Bacys said.
All the components and uses will take some learning. That’s why the district staff are excited the new video board is going up early in the summer before school starts to build and work on content for soccer, football, girls flag football, the band and others who will be using the field, Bacys said.
He said the board also has a nice sound system to run everything through.
Bacys said they’re excited about making good experiences for the fans and students on the field.
According to Carol Wade, senior marketing director at Watchfire, the video board installation was to take two days.
The board had been completed for some time now. Wade thought the original install was planned for April or May, so Watchfire had it completed for that timeframe.
But “then the structure wasn’t ready, which is common in these types of projects where everything is being updated,” according to Wade.
The video scoreboard is part of $5.4 million in upgrades for the DHS field to include artificial field turf, new bleachers and increased handicapped-accessibility, and new player tunnels and press box.
Bacys has said the former 100-year-old concrete bleachers and main entrance stairs slowly had been crumbling and slipping away, and the tunnels the players come out of from the locker rooms also were eroding and were getting to be unusable.
Watchfire is headquartered in Danville and has manufactured electric signs since 1932 and LED signs, using meticulously sourced components from around the world, since 1998. Watchfire has more than 65,000 LED signs in operation worldwide, including the canopy at the Freemont Street Experience in Las Vegas, the largest single video screen in the world.
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