Line Producer playbook.

On a professional set, the line producer is the person who turns an idea into a schedule and a budget. The director says "we need a crane shot at sunset"; the line producer is the one who knows whether there is a crane, who is trained on it, and whether sunset is before or after the JV game ends.

Same job here, minus the budget. You own the schedule, the crew, and the gear plan. When a camera operator shows up at the right place with a charged battery, that was you. When nobody shows up, that was also you — which is the honest version of the job and the reason it's a real title.

• Game coverage — the home varsity schedule and the crew positions open on each game. You open the positions; students claim them.
• Group shoots — when a club needs portraits or a lip-sync video, you build the slot grid and they book themselves in. You also pull the call sheet out of it.
• The gear catalog and blackout dates — what exists, how many, and the days it can't leave the building because we need it.

All three are recoverable. A wrong call time gets fixed, a wrong slot gets released. Nothing on your dashboard can lose data or cost a family money — that's deliberate, so you can move fast without being nervous.

1. Go to Game Coverage. The home varsity schedule is imported from GoFan, so the fixtures are already there — you don't type games in by hand. Freshman and JV games are filtered out on purpose; we cover varsity.
2. Pick the game and set the crew positions you want filled. Five camera operators is the default; add a technical director, a director, and a line producer for anything we're streaming or cutting live.
3. Set the call time before the posted start time, not at it. Sixty minutes for a stream, thirty for single-camera. Gear takes longer to set up than anyone remembers.
4. Publish it and tell people. The Game Crew page is where they claim positions, and claiming one sends them their own confirmation.
5. Two days out, look at what's still unclaimed and go recruit in person. This is the part that can't be automated and it's most of the job.

The rhythm matters more than any single decision. A schedule everyone can trust is one that's updated on the same days every week.

• Monday — open every position for the week's home games. People plan their week on Sunday night; be there first.
• Wednesday — check what's unclaimed and chase it.
• Thursday — confirm the gear plan against the catalog. Batteries charged, cards formatted, blackout dates set for anything we need.
• Friday — be reachable. Something will change.
• Monday after — make sure everything came back. Gear that "someone has" is gear we've lost.

One number: games we actually covered, divided by games we said we'd cover. Not how many positions you opened. Not how organised the dashboard looks. Whether a camera was rolling.

The second measure is quieter: does the crew know where to be without asking you twice? When the answer is yes, you've built something that works without you standing in the middle of it, and that's the actual skill this job teaches.