What Is a Sports Media Day, and Is It Better Than Traditional Team Photos?

Team photos are changing.

The traditional individual portrait and team photo still have their place, but some teams are turning photo day into something bigger: a Media Day.

A Media Day gives athletes more variety, more personality and, importantly, gives the team a collection of marketing images they can use throughout the season - just like the pros.

What Happens During a Media Day?

We build a Media Day around your team and the amount of time you have available.

We can use just a portion of a practice and create a condensed Media Day experience, or take over the full practice and really go in-depth.

The more time we have, the more variety we can create.

We start with the essentials. Each athlete gets photographed individually, including headshots and portraits that can be used by the team throughout the season.

Then we create variety.

Jersey shots. Serious game faces. Different poses. The athlete's own choice. And yes, we always make sure we get the smile for Mom.

But Media Day really starts to separate itself from traditional team photos when we move into action.

Creating the Action

These aren't photographs from an actual game. They're controlled, semi-action photographs that allow us to create the look of game action while putting the athlete exactly where we need them.

For hockey, we might have a player skate toward us, stop, carve one direction while looking back the other way, shoot, spray the ice or repeat the a few times to captre it right.

Because we're directing the action, we can concentrate on lighting, expression, body position and timing.

And we usually finish with the athletes' favourite part.

The celly.

They've done everything we've asked, so now they get to skate through and show us their best goal celebration. It's a great way to finish the shoot, and it usually produces some of the most personality-filled photographs of the day.

Why Do a Media Day?

This is where Media Day becomes particularly valuable for an individual team.

You're already bringing the players together. Instead of organizing multiple photography sessions or trying to create content throughout the season, we can build a library of professional images in one session.

Use them for player introductions, game-day graphics, social media, tournament announcements, playoffs, sponsor posts, team websites, or season promotions. Even share them with players and parents

For an individual team, that makes Media Day an efficient and cost-effective way to get far more out of photo day.

It's not about replacing the team photo.

It's about asking what else we can create while we have the whole team together.