I Was Seven Years Old and Carrying Cables. That Was the Beginning of Everything.

I am sometimes asked how I got into this business. The honest answer is that I didn't choose it. It chose me, through my father, through a community of people who loved sports and broadcasting, and through a man named Gary Araki who saw something in a seven year old kid carrying cables and decided it was worth nurturing.

That kid grew up to oversee all of game presentation at Madison Square Garden, build and lead the show at the new Cowboys Stadium, and work many Olympic Games, Super Bowls, and FIFA World Cups. None of that happens without where it started, in Cupertino, California, in the 1980s, in a community that most people today would barely recognize.

Cupertino Before It Was Cupertino

If you know Cupertino today, you know it as the home of Apple, a global technology hub with a campus that has become one of the most recognized corporate landmarks in the world. But in the early 1980s, it was a quiet suburban community in the South Bay. Modest. Tight-knit. The kind of place where people knew their neighbors and the community college was a genuine gathering point for local talent. The entire Bay Area had a different energy then it was laid back, small-town in spirit, even if San Francisco was right there. Outside the city, the South Bay felt like any other friendly suburban community in America. Cupertino in particular was nothing special on paper. Apple was operating out of a small office building about a quarter mile from my house. IBM, Xerox, and HP existed, but they were corporate institutions that the average person interacted with in the abstract, not companies that had reshaped daily life yet. Nobody around us was talking about technology changing the world. We were just kids growing up in a nice, quiet neighborhood with great schools and a strong sense of community.

That community college, De Anza College, was where a lot of the people we ended up working with came from. Engineers, camera operators, technical enthusiasts who had skills and passion and not a lot of outlets for them. My father through his great friend Gary Araki were doing video production in its early stages. That lead to knowing the community college based local cable access station that was hungry for content. They needed programming to fill airtime. And nobody was providing them with something they genuinely wanted: live local sports.

So with Gary and my dad’s help, they built it. High school football games. High school baseball. Local events. Produced and broadcast on equipment that was state of the art for the era. It was a hobby that became a community and eventually, for Gary, a serious side business. And some games, the whole crew would pile into Jake's Pizza in Cupertino, a local institution that I believe is still there today, and decompress over a table full of delicious pizza, replaying what had gone right, what had gone sideways, and what we'd do differently next time. Those post-game pizza sessions were as much a part of my education as anything that happened on the field. The conversation around that table was where I first understood that broadcast production is a team sport, that the best crews talk through their work honestly, and that the people you do the job with matter as much as the job itself.

And in the middle of all of it was a seven-year-old kid who had been brought along to help.

Carrying Cables Is How Everyone Should Start

My first job on a broadcast crew was exactly what it sounds like. I carried long cables connecting the broadcast equipment to the cameras. The fun part was that they had converted an old Winnebago RV into a broadcast truck. So there was extra room to watch everybody work sometimes. Then once I was a little older it was a 3/4" tape deck for some sideline EFP shoots. Let me tell you that deck was heavy, between 40 to 70 pounds! Helping set up and tear down was essential as well. I was not directing anything. I was not operating anything. My value was in being willing, enthusiastic, and saying yes.

But you learn things by carrying cables that you cannot learn any other way. You learn the physical geography of a production, where everything lives, how it connects, what it takes to actually set up a broadcast from nothing. You hear conversations between engineers and directors. You watch how a crew communicates under pressure. You start to understand, without anyone formally teaching you, how a live broadcast actually works from the inside.

By the time I was ten years old I was operating cameras. The High 50 game camera for high school football, positioned high in the stands to capture the full field. The center field game camera for baseball, framing the pitcher and batter from straight away center. These were real cameras for broadcast, real productions, airing on a real cable access station in the Bay Area to real audiences. Nobody was treating me like a kid playing pretend. I was part of the crew, with a headset and a shot to deliver.

The Replay That Made Me Think Hey Maybe This Is My Thing

There is a specific moment I can still feel. I was a little older, middle school, maybe twelve or thirteen, shooting a football game from my camera position high in the stands. I had been doing this for a few years by then and I was starting to develop a feel for it. Not just pointing the camera at where the ball was, but anticipating and reading the play before it developed, finding the frame, staying with the action in a way that felt instinctive rather than reactive.

On one particular play I got a great replay shot. I don't remember the exact play, maybe a big run, a key tackle, something that mattered in the game. What I remember is the shot. The angle. The way it captured the moment cleanly and completely. The kind of shot that, when it gets cut into the replay, tells the story of what just happened better than any words could.

And then Gary's voice came through my headset.

“Great job, kid.”

Just those three words. But then a couple of the other guys on the crew chimed in too, a word of acknowledgment here, a good one there and for a moment the whole headset was a little warmer than it usually was in the middle of a game. It was brief. We moved on immediately because the game was still going and there was work to do. But something had shifted.

I remember thinking, standing at that camera position in the stands of a high school football game: this is the coolest thing I have ever done. And then, right behind that thought, something I hadn't quite let myself think before: this could be a job. This could actually be a career.

That's what a well-timed word of recognition from the right person can do for a kid. Gary didn't make a big deal of it. He didn't stop the production to deliver a speech about my potential. He just called it honestly, in the moment, on the headset, in front of the crew. And it landed in a way that I carried forward for the next forty odd years.

The Day I Almost Dropped the Camera

There is one moment from those early years that I have never forgotten. I was shooting the center field camera for a high school baseball championship game. The camera was mounted on a tripod inside a small wooden box elevated in center field, the kind of purpose built platform that gives you a clean sightline to the pitcher's mound and home plate. It was the middle of summer. It was hot. And I was a eleven-year-old kid who had already finished the one cup of water I'd brought with me.

I was thirsty. Everyone around me was busy because it was the middle of a championship game and the whole crew was locked in. Between innings I got on the headset and told the crew I was going to run and grab water quickly and be right back. And I did. There was water close by, thankfully. The whole thing took maybe a minute.

But when I climbed the wooden ladder back up into the camera box, I found the camera tilting forward on the tripod, slowly, inevitably, heading toward the opening at the front of the platform and fifteen feet of open air down to center field below it.

I had left without locking the tripod head.

I grabbed for it immediately but I was a small kid and this was a large, heavy professional camera and I did not have the strength to pull it back on my own. For a moment that felt much longer than it was, I was just trying to hold it in place. Then another camera operator, someone who had seen what was happening from their position, came sprinting over, climbed up into that little wooden box right behind me, and together we pulled the camera back to safety.

He showed me, firmly and clearly, how to lock the tripod head. How to verify it was locked. How to never, under any circumstances, leave a camera unsecured, even for thirty seconds, even between innings, even if you are desperately thirsty and will be right back.

Then I put my headset back on. And I got an earful from Gary.

He wasn't cruel about it. But he was direct, and he was thorough, and he made absolutely certain I understood what had almost happened and why it could never happen again. That conversation which was equal parts correction and instruction is one of the most valuable pieces of professional guidance I have ever received. I have locked every camera I have ever operated since that day. Every single one.

Gary Araki and the Winnebago That Became a Production Truck

Gary Araki is the reason I have a career.

He was my father's great friend. He also ran a computer store in Cupertino  when this was the era that rebuilding PCs was a genuine technical skill and a viable business, well before the industry consolidated around the brands we know today. Gary had that rare combination of technical aptitude and creative drive that made him genuinely excellent at broadcast production. And as my father's other commitments grew and pulled him away from the hobby he had introduced me to, Gary leaned in further.

The team had converted that Winnebago RV into a mobile production truck. Inside that camper was installed a video switcher, a replay machine, and tape playback. It was not a broadcast truck by professional network standards at all. But it was a fully functional mobile production unit built by hand, out of ingenuity and resourcefulness, by a team that wanted to do the work and figure out how to make the tools exist. That Winnebago took us from local cable access high school games to college athletics and eventually to state championship finals.

What Gary modeled for me was not just technical skill, though he had that in abundance. It was the disposition of someone who solves problems rather than waiting for them to be solved. Who builds the thing he needs when it doesn't exist yet. Who treats every production, regardless of the level or the audience size, with the same seriousness and craft. A high school baseball championship on a local cable access channel deserved the same professionalism as anything else. That standard is something I carried with me from that Winnebago all the way to Madison Square Garden.

The Community That Made It Possible

What I didn't fully appreciate until much later was how unusual what we had was. A community of technically skilled, sports-loving, production-minded people who showed up consistently, contributed generously, and collectively built something that none of them could have built alone.

The engineers from De Anza College who donated their time and expertise. The camera operators who ran to the center field box when a eleven-year-old kid needed help. The crew that made a converted Winnebago function as a legitimate production truck week after week. None of these people were paid much, if anything. They were there because they cared about the craft and about each other.

That is the environment that shaped me. Not a big time college program with tons of tools and connections. Not an ESPN internship. A tight-knit community of people who were genuinely excellent at what they did and who were willing to include a seven-year-old in it, and then a ten-year-old, and then a teenager, and treat every level of that growth as real.

I eventually went on to shoot my own EFP and ENG-style productions with an early JVC camcorder my father had purchased, making home movies, shooting school functions and sports and musicals in the community, and learning to edit as well. The formal education of the craft was happening alongside the live broadcast work, reinforcing and expanding each other. By the time I was a teenager I had more hours of real production experience than many adults entering the industry.

What I Know Because of Where I Started

Forty odd years later, when I walk into a venue to assess a fan experience or coach a game presentation team, I am drawing on something that started in that wooden camera box in center field. The understanding of how a live production actually works, not from a director's chair but from every position on the crew. The instinct for what can go wrong and why. The respect for the craft at every level, from the person running cable to the person calling the show.

None of that came from a classroom. It came from people, from my amazing father who brought his kid along and let him be part of something real, from a community that made space for curiosity and growth, and from Gary Araki, who directed my career before I even knew that's what was happening.

I think often about young people trying to find their way into this industry today, into sports production, game presentation, live events, or fan experience. The path looks very different now than it did in a Cupertino cable access booth in 1985. But the fundamentals haven't changed.

Find the people who are doing the work you want to do. Show up. Carry the cables. Pay attention to everything around you. Accept the correction when it comes, especially when it comes directly and without softening, because that is how people who care about their craft teach the people they believe in.

And always, always lock the camera before you leave!

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.