Operation Omaha: Helium and D1Baseball
The College World Series in Omaha, Neb., is a singular event for college baseball, so much so that anyone in the college game refers to it simply with one word: Omaha.
College baseball has played its championship in Omaha since 1950. In fact, just three College World Series have been played somewhere other than Omaha: 1947 and ’48 in Kalamazoo, Mich., and 1949 in Wichita, Kan. Eight teams converge on one location, all with the chance to take home the national championship. One site, eight top teams, and thousands of fans, many of whom regard a trip to the CWS as a bucket list baseball experience. Omaha in June is truly something special.
Helium client D1Baseball is the leading source for college baseball in the country. Aaron Fitt and Kendall Rogers are the national voices of the college game. When they call any coach in the country, the coaches happily pick up. And when they talk, people listen. The NCAA relies on D1 for coverage throughout the year, and uses D1’s Top 25 poll as its de facto rankings. It’s a coveted position for a media company to be in.
Making The Best, Better
Aaron and Kendall are at the top of college baseball media, and people have been reading their CWS coverage for years. So why change if they’re doing it well and drawing readers? At Helium, we don’t want to change how they cover college baseball, but we want to elevate their coverage and get it in front of as many people as possible. Our job is to make sure that D1Baseball doesn’t get complacent and continues growing.
D1Baseball’s healthy (and growing) subscriber base shows the appetite for the written content Aaron and Kendall (and the full roster of D1 writers) provide, but the sports media landscape is ever-changing. Game stories still matter, but they need to be supplemented heavily with video, audio and social media posts.
After looking at what D1Baseball had done in the past at the CWS, in 2021 we wanted to expand their coverage by being more active in real-time on social media and helping them create more and different video content to supplement their postgame coverage.
What follows is a detailed breakdown of D1Baseball’s CWS coverage in 2019, and a review of what we did in 2021, when Helium Agency fully managed D1’s social media and was on site to produce high-level video content, and how it benefited D1 and ultimately improves their bottom line.
