By Sam MacGilpin
@sam_macgilpin
This past winter the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) announced that they struck a deal with FloSports, a global independent sports media company and streaming platform. The agreement will be for at least five years, and the member schools will get 90% of the money from the agreement.
Springfield College director of athletics Craig Poisson was at the forefront of discussions about the deal along with other NEWMAC ADs, and thought it was a perfect opportunity in today’s world of streaming rights.
“College athletics is evolving rapidly across all three NCAA Divisions and that includes the area of media rights,” Poisson said. “FloSports approached the NEWMAC administrators, who then engaged member institutions’ Presidents about the possibility of a streaming partnership.”
The deal will mark an entire revamp of streaming for sporting events. While the NEWMAC Sports Network has streamed games for several years, the NEWMAC thought they needed a change of scenery. The FloSports deal will be in effect the fall semester of 2024, and will have new requirements for streaming.
“Due to strategic forward thinking and implementation by our Sports Communication personnel and Information Technology staff, Springfield College Athletics is well poised as we head into the agreement,” Poisson said. “A tenant behind the partnership is an enhanced production quality and unified content distribution across the NEWMAC, meaning our away contest streams will be impacted positively.”
Springfield will be required to have multiple cameras for certain sporting events, such as football and men’s and women’s basketball. The broadcasts will now also be required to have a play-by-play announcer for every game or event, alongside a color commentator when appropriate. The broadcasts are prominently run by Communication/Sports Journalism students, and Poisson acknowledged the boost that FloSports can provide to the program.
“One of my initial thoughts was this partnership should lead to increased opportunities for Springfield College students,” Poisson said. “For example, I can see this elevating our Communication and Sports Journalism major, in particular, but also having an impact on students from any major interested in content creation, production and on and offscreen talent.”
The deal also gives leeway for Springfield to acquire brand new camera and video broadcasting equipment to bring an enhanced experience to the viewers on FloSports. tatistically speaking, FloSports is massive. The streaming platform’s college broadcasts reached more than 38 million people in 2023 and it is anticipating streaming over 6,000 total NCAA events during the end of the 2023-2024 season. More than 51 million live minutes were watched for NCAA conference partner events in the 2022-2023 academic year.
On top of that, FloSports will also improve social media and original content at Springfield, which is already in the top five of total interactions amongst all Division III programs. Poisson believes that the partnership will have a critical impact on student-athletes moving forward as well.
“As one of twelve member institutions in the NEWMAC, Springfield College will be well positioned to be at the cusp of the next shift in NCAA Division III Athletics,” Poisson said. “The agreement provides opportunities for Springfield College athletics – and the stories behind Springfield College student-athletes – to be shared widely domestically, as well as internationally.”
FloSports is a subscription-based platform that starts at $29.99 a month, or people can pay $150.00 for an annual subscription, which comes out to $12.50 monthly. The games will be live-streamed on FloSports, and will be free to the public on newmacsportsnetwork.com 72 hours after games end.