USA Powerlifting had 30,000 athlete members and were broadcasting their national championships with years-old technology. Rotating contractors meant no branding consistency: viewers never knew what to expect. They were quickly losing ground to other competitors but didn't have the vision to push forward.
Over two years, I built a $250,000-equivalent production system for around 70% less by being resourceful, thinking outside the box, and learning plenty of new skills along the way.
The result was an ESPN-level production that gave athletes the platform worthy of their performances.
Disciplines
Systems Thinking
Interface/Interaction Design
Data Integration
Branding
Year
2022-2025
Team
Barbell Productions · Jan Daurio
Overall, USA Powerlifting gained operational efficiency, a repeatable formula that makes viewers more likely to return for viewing, and a suite of visual and feature-based improvements that wowed audiences, friends, and family around the world.
USA Powerlifting's energy is something else. Having been a competitor and athlete for many years, you see some of the hardest working, most humble, craziest people around. It was a privilege to tell their stories.
Advanced overlays. Pictured here is a custom bottom ticker that recaps the week's events, with a schedule up top.
Early on, we took measurements, headshots, and videos for all professional athletes to use for overlays and social media assets in the years ahead.
We loved athletes getting a little creative with their shoots. The federation is made better by these athletes bringing their larger than life personalities on and off the platform.
Systems-level strategies meant leveraging one thing to create another. It's all interconnected, with potential to have unpredictable, beneficial network effects.
Sticker shock was real: teamwide intercom was quoted at $30,000. Beefy network switches were $4,000. Professional video switchers up to $150,000. Don't get me started on cameras.
The hack was a lively community of pros all doing more with less. I was able to piece together reliable systems at literal fractions of these prices.
I worked on a broad range of vectors that all help to improve the broadcast production. Each of these involved research, iteration, and working with USA Powerlifting to find the best possible options.
Early overlay prototypes. The goal is to show just the right amount of information: keep the focus on the action, but have glanceable data if the viewer everything they need to know about the athlete.
Using prosumer-level cameras, stabilization, lighting, and audio allows for near-indistinguishable levels of polish from major broadcasting at a fraction of the price.
Custom barbell creation in Blender was made to exact real-world specifications. These were then used for backgrounds, transitions, and social media.
Running live events is a chaotic mix of flow state and problem-solving. Hearing comments that this stream was the best in powerlifting gave us life, and hearing from the family and friends of athletes just how special it was that they could watch their loved ones made it all worth it.
Here's a selection of a few things we implemented along the way.
A new standings graphic was a feat. It had to be configurable by weight class, division, or flight, and sortable by total or coefficient.
1.
Improvements are only ever iterative, not stepwise.
It's easy to make sweeping conclusions about overnight successes, but the reality is that features are all built with trial and error and small, incremental changes.
2.
I learned to roll with the chaos of live events.
In dry run situations, it's so easy to see how well things are working. In the heat of real events, of the real world, things come up. Keeping a cool head and problem-solving, compartmentalizing, communicating, and learning are quicker routes through the chaos.
3.
Most things are possible with hard work and dedicated effort.
Not that the world's problems exist because we aren't working hard enough, but I feel that putting one's head down and singularly focusing can accomplish amazing things.
