The First Days, Conducting Opening Ceremony

On the first day, collaboration took place with the FISU Photo Cluster Managers, faculty members, and university students to organize and carry out the opening ceremony. This involved arranging positions for the photographers and coordinating with the broadcasters to ensure that each photographer received consistent color quality. The galleries below display the planning process and the final outcome of the opening ceremony.

For Opening Ceremony and throughout the Games, Isaiah used his leadership skills developed during his time at Bowling Green to help develop a positive culture within the team and worked with each individual to maximize the experience for everyone.

• Isaiah Vazquez – Ice Level, Center
• Hailey Trejo – Ice Level, Right side
• Maddie Crooke – Behind the Scenes and Cauldron Lighting
• Surya Vaidy – Top Deck
• Professor Gitner – Top Deck Left
• Nancie Battaglia – Roaming

After finishing the opening ceremony, Isaiah, Professor Gitner and Professor Glass reviewed the photographers files and metadata and gave additional advice to help keep captions clean, concise and easy to process. This included nightly reviews to empower photographers to pursue the imagery they envision. 

In the next days, photographers had the opportunity to meet Photo Cluster Managers throughout the Games. The managers featured alumni of multiple international games including past Pan-American Games, FISU Games, and Olympic Games. 

During the opportunities, Isaiah got to learn more from photogaphers about their experiences covering international games, including how they strategize coverage for ceremonies and how they arrange coverage of the games as a whole. This included having a group of photographers stationed to certain buildings and sports, while having others visit different venues each day.

By the fourth day of the Games, the Newhouse group was able to understand the workflow and work well throughout the games. Here’s several of the participants opinions about the workflow. 

However, issues started to arise as our original uploading system was Dropbox, and on the fly we adjusted to move to Google Drive as a temporary

By the end of the first week, many of the students were able to smoothly work through events with little issues. 

The Second Week, Reduction in Crew, Handling Burnout

Following the first week of the games, the first week of the Spring semester at Syracuse began, requiring many of the graduate students and all of the undergraduate students to leave the Games and return to Syracuse. Dwindling the force from 19 people down to four. 

The remaining group, consisting of Bond Photos, Isaiah Vazquez, Hailey Trejo and her husband Andres Trejo, expanded their roles to serve as the Main Press Center desk during off time and occasionally covered more events than normal on a given day.

As the group started to shift over, the team communicated with the FISU staff to reorganize and structure the importance of events being covered. An example is putting aside hockey coverage to give coverage to more underrepresented sports, such as snowboarding and skiing. 

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To assist with the efforts, FISU hired a freelancer, Logan Swney and recruited a student from Paul Smith’s College of the Adirondacks, Amanda LaMonda, to help assist with the photographic coverage. 

The Last Days, The Final Stretch

Heading into the final weekend of the games, a number of the students returned to assist with the last batch of events which came at a critical time as 17 medaled events happened over three days, including the finals series for curling and men’s, women’s ice hockey. Students who returned to the games included graduate students Sammy Swiss and Kayla Breen. 

With the last day in mind, Isaiah looked ahead and secured locker room access for photographers covering the Gold medal games. Bond Photos covered the United States while Isaiah covered team Canada.

In the closing ceremony, the team worked together to establish new positions for the closing ceremony in conjunction with the Men’s Gold Medal Hockey Game.

Closing Ceremony Assignments

• Kayla Breen – Bronze Medal Game, Closing Ceremony priority images
• Bond Photos – Gold Medal Game, USA facing, Closing Ceremony side
• Isaiah Vazquez – Gold Medal Game, Canada facing, Center Ice
• Professor Glass – Press box/Main Press Center

The Conclusion of The Games

After Team Syracuse finished their journey at the FISU Winter World University Games, the Lake Placid Staff made high praise for the student team taking part in the team project.