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By Jonathan Cribbs, West Virginia University
Sean Merinar swayed in the control room high above Mountaineer Field as UT Martin’s offensive line crouched at first and goal. The Skyhawks were yards from a touchdown that would have cut the Mountaineer lead to 7 in the first quarter of a game that was already slipping away from the visitors.
“I got it if we get a turnover,” Merinar said to his team, hovering over the bank of screens he uses to control what fans see on the stadium’s giant video board and hear on the loudspeakers.
As a Skyhawks receiver sprinted left and cut toward the end zone, the center snapped the ball to his quarterback, who ran it up the middle — right into a swarm of Mountaineer defenders who pancaked him in seconds. The football squirted from a pile of bodies into the waiting hands of West Virginia University linebacker Ben Cutter.
“Turnover!” Merinar shouted, clicking on a playlist of songs he had prepared to ignite the crowd, and a custom edit of Electric Callboy’s “We Got the Moves” blasted across the roaring stadium as fans bounced in celebration.
Merinar turned and grinned.
“It’s just a loop I made.”
From the tip-top of Milan Puskar Stadium, Sean Merinar’s team controls the heartbeat of Mountaineer Nation.
Building the show
There were a lot of moments like that one as Merinar oversaw the September 12 game from his perch in the press box tower, conducting ticket-buyers’ experiences from the moment they took their seats.
Ringleader of the stadium’s video production team, Merinar spends many fall Saturdays at Milan Puskar Stadium, sitting between announcer Bill Nevin and Camden Green, his new assistant director of big screen productions.
“We are the show that’s happening within the game,” he said.
It’s a logistical undertaking that’s carefully planned and runs nonstop. Merinar, WVU’s director of athletics video, rarely sits as he shepherds his staff and the audience through a multimedia parade of replays, song and movie clips, advertisements, sponsorships, performances and — if the game is going well — jubilant celebration from the crowd.
“We’ve got to be 10 steps ahead, pretty much,” he said. “Game days are exhausting.”
Merinar’s crew works out of a control room that’s small, hot on late summer days and wide open to the roar of the crowd.
In addition to Green and Nevin, the team includes Lucas Facemire, a freelancer and WVU alum, and Zoey Watson, a senior who runs the stadium’s auxiliary video boards.
“If WVU is driving, we’re live on the board with football action,” Merinar said. “We score a touchdown, we’re the ones launching the touchdown graphics. We’re the ones putting the player headshot up. We’re changing the Allstate graphic after because they sponsor extra points, and we’re connecting with the band, saying, ‘Band, fire now. Play.’”
But the show doesn’t start on game day. Days earlier, the Athletics Marketing Department, the Athletics Department and local reps from Learfield — the company that sells in-stadium advertising — sit down together. Noah Smith, assistant athletics director for marketing, hands out a script of everything Nevin will read and a “grid”: an Excel file with each production element timed to the second. Then the week is spent combing over it, rehearsing it, editing it again and again.
Game day starts four to five hours early with one more run-through — a final dress rehearsal to make sure every cue lands and every button works. Then it’s showtime.
Less than 30 minutes to kickoff on September 12, the tunes came fast: AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” and “Shoot to Thrill.”
Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”
A “Let’s Go, Mountaineers!” chant.
The band played.
The ROTC color guard marched.
A moment of silence for those lost on September 11 bled into the national anthem, and the crowd answered with “USA!” chants of its own.
As the Mountaineers finished their walk through the tunnel and the Pride cleared the field, Merinar watched the clock count down toward a fixed marker in the pregame sequence, usually around the 5:15 mark.
He raised the walkie-talkie that connects him to production staff throughout the stadium.
“I’m launching the entrance video in 3, 2, 1, fire,” he said.
Reading the room
For Merinar, the job is less about technology than reading a crowd. He must know when to push and when to let go.
“It’s psychology, making sure they want to be up when the team needs them to be up and down when they need to be down,” he said. “We’ve called it ‘conducting the band’ up there. We want the crescendo here, but then we want to bring it down.”
He serves the same role at other WVU sports as well, but what works at a football game — intensity, aggression, a crowd on its feet — falls flat at women’s basketball, where the audience responds better to a family-friendly tone.
Much of the job, Merinar said, is trial and error, and knowing when to abandon something that isn’t working.
“Try everything once. Don’t force anything,” he said. “That’s our biggest thing.”
When a bit fails, he doesn’t blame the crowd.
“It’s not their fault,” he said. “What could I have done differently? What could we do differently to repackage it, to change it, to maybe get a reaction out of them?”
At the peak of the action, Merinar has everyone in the stadium dancing to his tune.
The playlist
Merinar has been perfecting his judgment for the last 17 years. He grew up on a family farm in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle and graduated from WVU in 2007 with a degree in broadcast journalism. He worked in Columbus, Ohio, producing digital sports content before returning to Morgantown in 2010 for a production assistant job that turned into the in-game video role he still holds.
“I just started to learn from scratch,” he said.
One of the most important lessons learned: You need reliable weapons — songs, namely.
One of the songs Merinar leans on hardest he first heard in-game in the fall of 2008, watching USC dismantle Ohio State. As the Buckeyes fell behind, the band leaned on one song, repeatedly — “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes.
“As the band kept playing it, the USC players were stepping and dancing to it on the sidelines,” Merinar said. “I was like, this is really, really cool.”
When he got to WVU in 2010, he pitched it to the colleague he was learning the job from.
“We tried it, and the fans stuck with it, and now it’s one of our things,” Merinar said.
DMX’s “Party Up” followed the same path, borrowed on the spot after Virginia Tech’s crowd erupted to it in 2017 during a neutral-site game in Washington, D.C.
“I was like, oh, we’re stealing that,” Merinar said.
Not every song in his library was chosen — some were earned.
Take “Hypnotize,” by The Notorious B.I.G. That became WVU’s biggest defensive cue after Merinar happened to play it during a fourth-down stop against Iowa State that sealed a win.
“The place went bonkers,” he said. “So that became one of our big moments.”
The shows go on
Merinar can’t afford to fail live, which is why he treats redundancy like a religion.
He’s had video files lose their audio track without warning, he said, minutes after they were working fine.
But while a dropped audio track is one thing, a full blackout is another. Merinar is superstitious enough about that worst-case prospect not to even talk about it directly.
“I’m not going to, based on what just happened to Florida State,” he said, only half joking. “I’m knocking on wood.”
What happened to Florida State: a total power outage mid-game against Southern Methodist University on September 7, forcing the crew to run the scoreboard and clock by hand for two hours. Merinar called it flatly “the biggest nightmare that you see in this industry.”
Fortunately, no such problems occurred against UT Martin. After an energetic first half, with WVU establishing a brutal lead — 28-0 by halftime, en route to a 52-7 final — the Mountaineers cruised to their second win of the season.
On the field, it was a trouncing. For Merinar, it was just another Saturday.
“It was honestly a pretty standard show,” he said.
