Photo By Abigail MacMillan
By Matt Guear
Editor’s Note: This piece is the conclusion of The Quill’s “Unsung Heroes” series, where we dive into the stories of the people who make SU athletics possible
In July, the Landmark Conference announced a monumental five-year deal with FloSports, a subscription-based sports broadcasting company, that gave the Texas-based company exclusive rights to broadcast all conference matches. This deal was the first of its kind for any Division III conference.
This monumental agreement presented a great deal of challenges. Even though SU’s athletic communications department was already producing high-quality streams, FloSports demanded a higher quality broadcast that is difficult to produce for a school of Susquehanna’s size.
Enter Jared Klimas, a senior computer science major who also serves as the technical and broadcasting operations coordinator for the athletic communications office.
Klimas has been instrumental in the implementation of new software (vMix) that the department now uses to stream games, matches, meets, and everything else in between.
“When we had the whole FloSports thing come in, no one knew what was gonna happen with this whole deal and what was gonna come of it,” said Klimas. “We actually had to take what we were doing and improve upon it. So we, you know, we always were at the higher end of the broadcast standards, but now we wanted to improve on that.”
Setting up the program over the summer was no easy task, but once it was ready to go, Klimas couldn’t have been happier.
“So, my favorite memory from that is once we put everything together with the vMix and you know, it was a lot of work in the summer to get everything fine-tuned to the point, but the first broadcast that we had from both Apfelbaum and from our studio, when they went off perfectly and there were no issues, that was a great moment right there because that that was the culmination of all of the work we put in,” said Klimas. “To basically see it put into practice is definitely a very rewarding thing.”
Klimas came into SU with prior knowledge, as he ran multiple sports live streams at North Hunterdon High School, where he attended from 2016 to 2020.
In 2018, at the request of a parent and with the help of the school’s booster club, Klimas, along with his friend Kenny, were able to start live streaming some of the school’s wrestling matches.
When his first venture proved to be successful, Klimas moved into streaming basically any other high school sport you could think of.
“I did live streams of softball, which then turned into live streams of football. And then once football had live streams in my high school, I was doing everything else,” said Klimas.
That prior experience prepared him for his endeavors with the athletic communications office. However, while Klimas does enjoy the comfort of often being busy with a live stream, he prefers something else even more: problem-solving.
“I always liked problem-solving and what better way to solve problems than to write programs,” said Klimas. “So, a lot of the times what I ended up doing was I ended up actually writing programs.”
In fact, it was his knack for solving problems that led Klimas to become a computer science major in the first place.
“So that’s kind of why I lean towards computer science. Because I, you know, I like using computers to solve problems and definitely being a computer science major, it teaches you to think outside of the box and be able to solve different problems.”
Klimas is revered for his troubleshooting ability when the various technology that the athletic communications office uses inevitably misbehaves.
One such instance I can recall was during a men’s basketball game this past season. The shot clock had stopped working and thus, the game stopped as well.
Klimas was working the live stream in the Apfelbaum Hall studio and drove all the way down to O.W. Houts Gymnasium, worked his magic as he often does, and the game resumed as if nothing had happened.
Klimas, a senior, is proud that he was able to play a large part in getting the live streams where they are now.
“I’m happy the legacy I’m going to be leaving behind just because, you know, before me we weren’t really doing much in streaming and, you know, it was just kind of bare bones,” said Klimas. “They weren’t really doing much. It was more of a ‘we had to stream it because we had to stream it’ type-of-deal. Now we’ve taken what we’ve gotten and we’re one of the best in D-III.”
Klimas will be missed; he’s been an integral part of athletic communication’s operations ever since he stepped foot on campus.
“Jared has been nothing short of extraordinary,” said Dan Graham, director of athletic communications at SU. “He will surely be missed next year.”
