When Wake Forest Recreation was looking for a way to keep student-athletes connected to their families back home and meet live streaming requirements for their league games, they needed a solution that was affordable, portable, and easy to hand off to student staff. After researching everything from iPhones on tripods to full AV setups with camera crews, they found Veo. Three years later, it has become a cornerstone of their club sports and intramural operations.

We spoke with Gregory Deverson, who oversees the intramural and club sports programs at Wake Forest, about how Veo fits into a program that supports 42 clubs and a busy intramural calendar.

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How did Veo first become part of Wake Forest's recreation programs?

We were trying to ramp up what we could offer our student-athletes. A lot of our students come from the northeast, out west, all over the country, and we wanted to find a way to keep them connected to their families back home. On top of that, some of our teams participate in leagues where live streaming is a requirement. Men's lacrosse was actually on the verge of being fined for not streaming their home games. We looked at every option you can think of, Facebook Live on an iPhone, iPads, full AV setups, and none of it really made sense for us. We found Veo through our research, reached out to another school in North Carolina that was using it, and they had good things to say. We took a shot, and we have been using it for about three years now.

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Which sports are you using Veo for?

We have two cameras available to all of our club teams, and we also use them for intramural championship games including basketball, soccer, and flag football. The teams that use them most consistently are men's and women's soccer, men's rugby, and men's and women's lacrosse. The teams that do use it tend to rely on it for both live streaming and film breakdown, sometimes both in the same week.

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How often are the cameras in use?

Definitely weekly. It depends on which teams are in season, but at least one of the cameras goes out every week. There are stretches in the semester where we are coordinating across multiple teams over a single weekend, one camera goes Friday and Saturday, the other goes Saturday and Sunday. Our staff typically handles setup, and for teams with an athletic trainer present like lacrosse, rugby, and soccer, the trainer will often set it up if no one else is available. Teams that are traveling come in the day before and grab the camera.

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What challenges were you looking to solve when you first brought Veo in?

The primary need was livestreaming for men's lacrosse. That was the whole reason. Since then it has grown into something more. We now get messages from parents, someone's grandma, when we don't stream an intramural championship game. That was never the original goal, but it tells you something about the impact it has had.

From my side, one of the most valuable use cases has been intramural officials' training. I can pull real footage of my staff refereeing flag football, bring it into a training session, and talk through what happened with the actual person sitting in the room. That is a lot more effective than putting up NFL clips that don't translate to what we're doing. And the video quality holds up even when it's embedded in a PowerPoint over Zoom, which matters when we're running remote training sessions.

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What would you tell other universities considering Veo?

The portability is a huge factor that I don't think people appreciate until they have it. Before Veo, none of our teams were recording their games at all. Now you can hand it off to a student, an athletic trainer, or a traveling team and know it's going to work. That flexibility is something a mounted or fixed camera system simply cannot offer.

The durability has also genuinely impressed us. The cameras have fallen from the tripod more than once and the lenses and housing have held up every time. For the price point and everything it enables, especially for teams traveling and streaming games away from home, we have definitely gotten our money's worth.

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What made Veo the right choice for Wake Forest?

Price point and portability, honestly. Our rugby teams now plan their whole film breakdown sessions around it. Men's lacrosse relies on it. Teams get upset if the camera is not available when they need it. That kind of buy-in tells you it's working. We didn't buy it for rugby, they just decided they had to have it.

As our program continues to grow and we start thinking about how to elevate our club sports, the conversation around upgrading the technology will come naturally. But the camera we bought three years ago still does exactly what we need it to do.