The TV broadcast (in HD) was amazing - top end all the way. Not sure what Tara' problem was with saying U...Q...T...R, but it was certainly awkward.
Agree - AUC lights are below par. The NCAA teams Foyle and I visited in October had great lighting - this has to be the next upgrade to the AUC.
My only knock against the organizing committee was the streaming quality. The betamax camera they had was not suitable and the camera man was inexperienced (always zooming out). The play-by-play was great by Darren Dupont (
darrendupont.com) as well as Darren's post game videos and audio interviews. However, it all looked last minute at times.
True the streaming could be better. Granted, the person doing it is likely used to Rutherford Arena and the PAC at the U of S. In both cases you aren't that far removed from the action. The company used is the same as the streaming for canadawest.tv. I appreciate being able to see road games (and the home games I cannot get to), but they aren't top notch. Next year, if the organizing committee has the cash to do it, they should hire the Shaw technical crews that do the Canada West Football Game of the Week.
My other problem with the streaming is that they omitted the intermissions. Now granted, I only watched the two Huskies games through the streaming, but both games went silent instead of carrying the CJWW intermission. I muted the streams and listened to CJWW's stream.
I felt bad for the people listening on the radio as they would go to commercial, but play didn't stop. They need to follow the WHL timing format with breaks for radio coverage. If the game isn't on the radio or TV, then no breaks are needed.
Darren Dupont was good, but I would have preferred Les Lazaruk doing the games. Obviously, with the schedule coinciding with Blades road games this was impossible, but I found Darren Dupont wasn't as excited as Les gets. That said, considering I thought of his play by play as the Huskies' radio broadcast as opposed to an objective "national" broadcast, he can't be a Huskies cheerleader the whole way through.
I see in this morning's Star-Phoenix the organizing committee tried to get the format changed to a longer tournament (timewise) and true semi-finals and the CIS said no. It looked like the organizing committee wanted to have a Memorial Cup style tournament where the schedule is known beforehand. I understand the whole business of preserving the education of the players. But I have a suspicion that only the U of S Huskies went to class Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the other teams were all in Saskatoon that whole time.