To say that a lot has changed since I covered sports in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s would be the understatement of the century, but among all of that change, one type of sports media stands out as being particularly and exponentially different from anything I created “back in my day” (insert gif of old man yelling at the clouds here).

Hype videos are an area of sports storytelling that are unique unto themselves, as they are an amalgamation of so much of the sports coverage your students are already doing, allowing them to either preview an upcoming event or provide highlights from a big win. The biggest difference — and what makes it truly unique — is that it starts to blur the line between journalism and PR, as evidenced by the key word in its name: hype. Typically I would say that “hyping up” our audience for a big game or about a team we cover really isn’t our job, as it removes the objectivity that we are trying to teach our student-reporters to maintain. 

I started to notice hype videos becoming popular as social media platforms like Twitter and especially Instagram and TikTok grew in popularity. They are neat, shiny, short-form packages that play really well there, and our audience absolutely loves them — not to mention that my students absolutely love creating them.

My social media director who created most of our hype videos the past few years put it to me this way: yes, hype videos are similar to highlight packages, but the former tells the story of the game or the team, while the latter gives the facts and information.

I guess that was a long way of saying that it really is up to you how you want to handle what I consider to be the newest form of sports storytelling. I know of some programs who avoid them because of that aforementioned lack of objectivity inherently contained in them, and others who have embraced them both because there is obviously a little bit of cheerleading for our own schools and teams in our sports coverage (however much we try to minimize it) and for the simple fact that this is a part of the media landscape in which our students live and in which some of them will be working professionally some day. We all know that many of our students won’t work in traditional (or “legacy”) media, but instead will apply the skills we have taught them to other professions, and that includes working for the athletic departments or sports teams themselves. With that being the case, creating hype videos will be a big part of their collegiate and/or professional lives.

With all of that said, here is a breakdown of the elements of the typical hype video that will either be getting people fired up for an upcoming season or just a big game.

One very sophisticated option is to have an overarching theme and have the video feel a bit like a movie trailer. The bonus here is that it allows our students with a background in film and/or graphics to show off those skills by letting them bleed over into their sports media work.Because these videos will oftentimes make use of little (if any) b-roll of actual game action, you will want to work with the team to get staged video of the athletes, often with cool backgrounds, lighting, and special effects like smoke machines. 

• This legendary one for USC football brings many of those elements together into something that looks more Hollywood than L.A. Times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=jeaXJSDvsLY
• Providing a stark contrast to that, Texas football produced something that uses exclusively b-roll footage — with zero staged shots — along with a script being read by someone associated with the program: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_lStGURnJn/
• Then you have something unique like this — from the the University of Cincinnati’s men’s basketball program — that is full of quick cuts between both action and reaction b-roll, and is by far the shortest that I’ve seen, running only 30 seconds: https://www.tiktok.com/@smjmedia_/video/7462447141466787115?_r=1&_t=ZT-8xJo0Up5yaT
• With those serving as my students’ inspiration, they created this one for our boys’ basketball team that combines b-roll and pre-recorded shots into something that played beautifully over social media: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDahL3RxJ_b/?igsh=dGdxbWl3amsycDg2
• Then there is this one, which we used as the “open” for all of our football Livestream broadcasts that season. It combines game highlights from our live broadcasts the previous season, along with prerecorded posed video clips: https://vimeo.com/591615796
• Finally, a unique hype video that served as both a recognition of a regional championship by the baseball team as well as to get people hyped for the upcoming sectional. You can see the amount of time it took to edit up all of those highlights, most of them coming from our live broadcasts of the games: https://vimeo.com/562586098

So as you can obviously tell, in order to make a great hype video, your students will need to get to multiple games and/or practices (and to NOT be shy … tight shots are the best shots!) and shoot some unique b-roll (both action and reaction) so they can make a lot of quick cuts to keep that energy flowing throughout the video, and then perhaps work with coaches and athletes to set up a time and location to get pre-recorded posed footage. Beyond that, it comes down to creative editing to pull off this unique and evolving storytelling form.

Note: This post was originally part of my MJE Project, “Beyond the Box Score: A Multimedia Approach to Comprehensive High School Sports Coverage,” which I completed in the Fall of 2025.