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With Aagaard’s promotion, Power will lead operations

CBS Sports will have a new face running the operations department at its biggest events, like the Masters, NFL and NCAA tournament.

AAGAARD
The network promoted longtime executive Ken Aagaard to executive vice president of innovation, research and development, freeing up Patty Power to run the operations department as executive vice president of operations and engineering.

“I’m still going to be involved in the big events — the Masters, the PGA Championship, Super Bowl, ‘Thursday Night Football,’” Aagaard said. “I’m giving up the day-to-day responsibilities of those to Patty Power, who I’ve been training for the last three to five years. Everything in the sports division is going to be in good hands, and it’s going to allow me to focus on the fun

POWER
stuff.”

The move is a promotion for Aagaard, who has led CBS Sports’ technical operations department since 1998. Now, he will focus on innovation and research, developing new on-air TV production elements for CBS. He is knee-deep in 4K television and high dynamic range. Aagaard will lead CBS’s technical vision for a network that was the first to do instant replay in 1963 and produced the first NFL game in high definition in 1998.

Power will oversee all of CBS Sports’ operations, engineering and production management, with around 70 people reporting into her.

This move puts Power as one of the highest-ranking women in sports media; she was honored by SportsBusiness Journal in 2013 as a Game Changer. But Power cringed when I asked if she felt like a trailblazer in the business.

“Trailblazer? Not really,” she said. “I never really looked at what I do as a female doing a specific role. I’ve always just done my job. I work with a lot of women on my team who are in very high-level operations roles. Trailblazer? I do feel like I’m carving out a path for the next generation.”

■ ■ ■

CBS Sports has been home to technical innovations such as its video chalkboard and shot tracking in golf.
Since I had Aagaard on the phone, I couldn’t wait to ask for his thoughts on the most influential technologies to hit sports TV. Some of his answers surprised me:

Instant replay: “This was maybe the most important thing that ever happened. CBS was the first to do it in 1963.”

Football’s virtual first-down line: “That changed the way people watched the games. Can you imagine watching football without the first-down line anymore? That virtual technology, of course, has become a lot more

mature.”

High definition: “Go back and look at [a standard-definition] screen. You can’t read the graphics. I remember way back when, when Fox came out with the glowing hockey puck. The problem was that it was produced for an SD set. You couldn’t see the puck. The first time I really saw high definition actually working was at Madison Square Garden, where it was being done on a regional level at a hockey game in the late 1990s. I said, ‘We need to do that on the network level.’ We ended up doing four NFL network games in 1998, which were the first network high-definition broadcasts.”

— John Ourand

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