One week on from the launch of iSportLearn, Ben Page, Head of Content and Programme at iSportLearn and Content Manager of iSportConnect, takes us through how the project came to life after many months.

It was a terrific feeling to be able to release iSportLearn into the wider world last Monday after what feels like an eternity on the project but is in reality a mere eight months.

In September last year as we started to plan how we were going to bring iSportLearn together, it felt rather overwhelming. Producing 64 videos, all-around 45 minutes in length, with 60 high-level executives from around the world of sport was never going to be a simple task.

The earliest plan proposed to me was that we would travel (within reason) to every local playmaker within the UK and have those further afield have cameras sent to them for the recording. Alas, Coronavirus did not let up at the end of summer, which meant swiftly adapting our model to online recording, which in retrospect certainly helped to speed up the process.

Pulling together the content for all of the sessions was done through a combination of myself and Jay Stuart, each of us splitting up the courses and devising what was of most interest to those entering the industry, with feedback from our playmakers on their specialist subjects to ensure we did not miss the key information.

Meanwhile, the playmaker recruitment and organisation of timings to film was undertaken by the rest of the iSportLearn team: Sandy Case, Joe Condon and Tom Riley.

As it turns out, many of these key people within the sports industry have rather busy schedules… who’d have guessed?

iSportLearn commenced filming on the 28th of October and, after many packed weeks in the calendar later, concluded on the 16th of February. A key point here is that we must, of course, thank all of our playmakers for being involved as this project could not have happened without them buying into the initiative.

With the UK stuck in another lockdown, throughout the early months of 2021, it made it even more difficult for us to be able to complete iSportLearn, as time in the office was required to utilise our greenscreen (installed extremely professionally by Joe and I using half a roll of duct tape).

The outtakes reel of Jay and I recording our much more minor parts of the modules is most certainly a long one, we’ll save that for another day, but I’m sure there will be a great deal of entertainment once I get there.

Did we make errors along the way with some of our decisions? Without doubt. But how quickly we were able to overcome these and rectify the situation is something we should most definitely be pleased with.

To pull together these 8 courses, there were 64 videos, more than 100 hours of filming with our playmakers, the creation of downloadable content for each module, the 567 questions, (and nearly 2000 potential answers), the time spent reviewing the material and adding subtitles to the modules, not to mention the hundreds of hours of video editing, both by myself and the team at White Label Studio, who we must also give a big thank you to, it has been a monumental undertaking and certainly an achievement worth celebrating by this small team.

We certainly hope that iSportLearn can become a tremendous success and be a force for good within the sports industry moving forwards.

As for the rest of the iSportConnect team, they now have to deal with all of us more frequently once again. I expect they’re hoping for iSportLearn’s next phase to begin soon!