The Rehearsal Is Either Your Greatest Asset or Your Biggest Waste of Time. The Difference Is You.

I have been in rehearsals that transformed a good show into a great one. I have been in rehearsals that demoralized an entire crew before the season even started. I have sat in a camera position for nine hours waiting to be called, never told I might not be needed until the final hour, watching the energy drain out of everyone around me in real time.

I have also been part of Olympic opening ceremony rehearsals and Super Bowl rehearsals, the largest, most complex live production rehearsals in the world, where hundreds of people across dozens of departments operated with such precision and shared purpose that every hour felt purposeful and every person knew exactly why they were there.

The difference between those two experiences was not budget. It was not venue size. It was not the scale of the event.

It was preparation, leadership, and a plan.

Rehearsals in game presentation are one of the most misunderstood and undervalued tools available to a sports organization. Most senior executives don't fully understand what goes into one or what comes out of one. Most buildings are so busy that rehearsal time is the first thing to disappear from the calendar. And most crews have been in at least one rehearsal that left them more confused and more exhausted than when they arrived, which is why the word itself can sometimes produce a quiet groan rather than genuine enthusiasm.

It's time to change that. Because a well-run rehearsal is one of the most powerful investments an event can make. And a poorly run one is one of the most damaging.

The Reality: Rehearsal Time Is Disappearing

Every sport presents a different rehearsal challenge and every building is getting busier. The first thing to go when schedules tighten is always rehearsal time. That is a choice with consequences that show up on game night whether anyone acknowledges it or not.

In the NFL, you typically get one rehearsal window, usually the day of the game, a few hours before doors open. That's your moment. Everything has to be loaded, tested, and ready to run before that window opens because once it closes the fans are coming in and whatever state your show is in is the state it stays in.

In the NHL and NBA the situation is similar, game day rehearsal is often the only option, squeezed between the morning skate or shoot-around and the opening of the building. In MLB it can be worse. With up to ten home games in a homestand and turnaround times that leave almost no open time, rehearsal can be functionally impossible on a rolling basis. You are often relying entirely on the muscle memory your crew built at the start of the season and hoping nothing has changed since.

This is the environment in which most game presentation directors are working. And it makes every available rehearsal window not just valuable but critical. Which means running it well is non-negotiable.

The Rehearsal That Wasted Everyone's Time

Early in my career I was part of a rehearsal for a special in-game ceremony, the kind of elevated moment that justifies a dedicated rehearsal day separate from the regular game day schedule. The organization had booked the building. The crew had been called. The production team was there. It had all the ingredients of a productive day.

What it did not have was an agenda.

Nobody had communicated a clear plan for what would be rehearsed, in what order, for how long, or what the definition of done looked like for each element. Decisions that should have been made before the crew arrived were being made in real time in the venue with everyone watching and waiting. Content that should have been loaded and tested before the rehearsal was still being finished. Technical issues that a pre-rehearsal tech check would have caught in an hour were surfacing in the middle of run-throughs and stopping everything.

The rehearsal went all day and all night. People were confused, idle, and demoralized in the way that only a long day of unproductive waiting can demoralize a crew. By the time it ended nobody felt more prepared than when they had arrived. They felt less confident, not because the show was bad but because the rehearsal had failed to give them any clarity about what good looked like.

I was one of those people. I sat at a camera position for nine hours. Nobody told me I likely wouldn't be needed until the final portion of the rehearsal. I was not given any context about the overall schedule or when my element would come up. I just waited. And waited. And watched the energy drain out of the venue around me.

That rehearsal is the reason I became so precise about how I run them. Because I felt firsthand what a poorly run rehearsal does to the people you need to be energized and confident on game day. It is not a neutral experience. It is an actively damaging one.

The Other End of the Spectrum: Olympics and Super Bowls

The largest rehearsals I have been a part of were Olympic opening ceremonies and Super Bowl productions. These are events with rehearsal schedules that run for days or weeks, involving thousands of people across technical, creative, performance, broadcast, and operations departments, all of whom need something different out of each rehearsal session and all of whom have to coexist in the same building at the same time.

What makes those rehearsals function, despite their complexity, despite the scale, despite the pressure is precisely what makes any rehearsal function. Every department knows the schedule in advance. Every call time is communicated and respected. Every session has a defined objective and a defined end point. Technical issues are anticipated and resourced accordingly. No one is waiting without knowing why or for how long.

At that scale, a wasted hour does not just demoralize one crew member. It cascades across hundreds of people and dozens of interdependent schedules. The discipline required to prevent that is extraordinary and it is exactly the same discipline required to run a three-hour game day rehearsal for a 50-person crew in an NBA arena. The principles do not change with the scale. Only the consequences of ignoring them do.

Before the Rehearsal: Everything That Has to Happen First

A rehearsal is only as good as the preparation that precedes it. If your content isn't loaded, if your equipment hasn't been tested, if your script isn't ready, you are not rehearsing your show. You are rehearsing your setup. Those are two very different things and confusing them is one of the most common and costly rehearsal mistakes in game presentation.

My strong recommendation is always a tech rehearsal before the actual rehearsal. A dedicated session that is separate from the creative run-through and where the control room staff loads all content, tests all equipment, identifies all technical issues, and resolves as many as possible before a single performer or crew member is called to run anything. This session is not glamorous. It is not exciting. But it is the single most effective way to protect the time and energy of everyone who shows up for the actual rehearsal.

For this to work, the content creation team needs hard due dates that fall before the rehearsal date that are not the day of, not the morning of, but with enough lead time for the control room to load, organize, and test everything properly. Those due dates need to be set, communicated, and enforced from the top. When content arrives late it does not just delay the load-in. It delays the tech rehearsal, which delays the actual rehearsal, which delays everything else and puts the entire day behind before it has begun.

For special events that can include an opening night, a jersey retirement, or a championship celebration, make sure the crew you are rehearsing with is the crew that will be there on the event day. Rehearsing a complex ceremony with a partial crew and then explaining it again to the full group on game day doubles your work and halves your confidence. The people who need to execute the moment need to have run it together before the moment arrives.

Managing Senior Leadership at a Rehearsal

Most senior executives in sports organizations do not fully understand what a game presentation rehearsal requires or produces. That is not a criticism, it is simply outside their daily experience. Your job before any significant rehearsal is to close that gap proactively.

Brief senior leadership before the rehearsal. Tell them what you are trying to accomplish, what the schedule looks like, and what a successful rehearsal produces for the show. If they want to observe specific elements as they often do, ask them before the rehearsal what those elements are. Build a specific window into your rehearsal schedule when those items will be run and you will be ready for an audience. Put that window in their calendar and remind their assistants the morning of.

This approach does two things. It makes leadership feel included and informed, which builds trust and reduces the likelihood of unscheduled interruptions. And it protects your rehearsal, because a senior executive walking in mid-session with questions or feedback at an unplanned moment can stop a rehearsal's momentum in ways that are very difficult to recover from.

If questions or issues arise during the rehearsal that are above your direct authority to address, have staff designated to handle them, people who can engage leadership, get answers, and relay information without pulling you off the headset. Your job during a rehearsal is to run it. Everything else should be managed around you.

Running the Rehearsal: The Details That Make the Difference

Set your call time early enough that everyone is situated before anything starts. Then hold your production meeting thirty minutes after call time, not at call time. This gives late arrivals and setup crews the time they need while ensuring everyone who matters is in the room when the plan gets communicated.

At the production meeting, walk through the full rehearsal agenda. Will you run in linear show order or bounce around by element? What specific moments are you going to drill until they are right regardless of how long it takes? What does success look like for this rehearsal? Be explicit about all of it. And address the room dynamic directly, if this is the first rehearsal back after the off-season and people are excited to reconnect, name it. Tell the crew you are glad everyone is back and that there will be time to catch up, but that once you get on headset you need everyone treating this like a game. That conversation in the production meeting prevents you from having it five times on the headset.

Before you start running anything, do a full headset check. Every position, every channel, confirmed. Technical communication issues during a rehearsal are a tax on everyone's time and patience. Your A1 and A2 should own this process, if something isn't working it is their problem to solve, not yours to wait on.

When technical issues arise during the rehearsal, as we all know they will, have your engineering team resourced to address them quickly. More support in critical technical positions is almost always the right call. An under-resourced engineering team trying to solve a complex issue while a crew sits idle is one of the fastest ways to lose a room.

Coordinate with your entertainment staff before the rehearsal on which elements of the script they most need to run. If you have a cheerleading or dance team, build their dedicated rehearsal time into the schedule before the full production rehearsal begins, not after. They need to be prepared and ready when their moment in the run-through arrives, and making them wait through four hours of technical elements before they get their time is neither respectful of their commitment nor productive for your schedule.

If you have on-air talent or performers involved in the show, meet with them before the production meeting. They need to understand what will be asked of them, in what order, and approximately when. A talent who has been waiting six hours to run a two-minute element and was never told that might be the case is not going to deliver their best performance when their moment finally comes. Respect their time by being honest about the schedule upfront.

Build a meal break into any rehearsal that runs longer than four or five hours. A fed crew is a focused crew. The second half of a long rehearsal after a proper break is categorically more productive than the second half of a long rehearsal after nothing. This is not a luxury, it is a management decision with a direct return on the quality of your rehearsal's back half.

What a Great Rehearsal Actually Produces

A well-run rehearsal does something that no amount of individual preparation can replicate: it builds collective confidence. It gives every person on your crew the experience of having run the show together and of knowing their cue, trusting their colleagues, and feeling what it is like when all the pieces work in sequence. That feeling is the difference between a crew that executes on game night and a crew that survives it.

It also surfaces problems when there is still time to fix them. The content issue that would have stopped the show cold in front of 90,000 fans gets caught in rehearsal because someone ran the sequence and it didn't work. The timing gap that would have produced an awkward silence during player introductions gets identified and corrected before anyone in the building notices. Rehearsal is where your show gets better. Game night is where it gets performed.

The organizations that protect rehearsal time and that fight for it in increasingly crowded venue calendars, that resource it properly, that run it with discipline and intention are the ones that consistently produce better fan experiences than the ones that don't. That is not a coincidence.

The rehearsal is a gift. Treat it like one.

And always, always tell your camera operators when they might not be needed until hour nine.

Matt Coy is VP of Experiences at CUENTO Marketing. He consults with sports teams, leagues, federations, and major events on fan experience strategy, assessment, and implementation. He also serves as a fractional VP of Game Presentation for select clients.