Newhouse Students Brave Elements, Welcome Challenges at Empire State Winter Games

Harsh winter weather and fresh challenges did not deter Newhouse School students from embracing the chance to improve their skills at the 2025 Empire State Winter Games (ESWG).

Twenty-two students ventured to Lake Placid, New York, from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2 to work as photographers, videographers, digital producers and content creators covering the largest amateur winter sporting competition in the state.

This is the fourth year Newhouse students have traveled to the home of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games as part of the one-credit Photography for Sports Media class.

Their assignment was to find and capture the best moments of the Games, which draw more than 2,500 athletes of all ages and abilities from the northeast and Canada to compete in 20-plus winter sports.

Professors Seth Gitner, Jon Glass and Jordan Kligerman led the trip, providing coaching and feedback on the students’ work throughout the four-day experience.

Battling the weather

One of the biggest challenges of capturing winter sports action is the weather. Friday night brought several inches of snow to the outdoor events. Temperatures on Saturday and Sunday dropped to single digits, but with the wind chill, it felt more like below zero.

On Friday night, advertising and creative production junior Cole Meredith was the videographer tasked with covering ski orienteering. Not only was the event in the dark with competitors only using headlamps to navigate the course, but blasts of snow added an extra layer of difficulty for Meredith.

“I was so worried about changing camera lenses in the snow,” Meredith said. “I didn’t want to get anything on my sensor because that would just destroy the camera.”

Despite those challenges, Meredith picked orienteering as his favorite event of the weekend.

“It was such a surreal experience, genuinely because you are in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “All the lights are out. The only lights you can see are from the clubhouse and from the headlamps of the 20 other people running around this open field.”

“You are trying to nail exposure and focus on a place where you can’t even see yourself,” he added. “It’s dead quiet. It’s such a strange feeling.”

Sharing the experience

Partnered with the Games’ marketing officials, the public relations student team kept busy from dawn until dusk creating original photo and video content for the official event and Newhouse accounts. They wrote press releases, published feature stories and produced a daily Games newsletter.

Television, radio and film senior Evan Kurkin opened the weekend by showcasing his day from the Whiteface Mountain ski slopes before working with the rest of the PR team to feed ESWG’s social channels.

“I got to start off by doing a takeover on the Newhouse Instagram,” Kurkin said. “I went posting on the story and going through Whiteface and recording the events there and everything, which was awesome.”

A mix of undergraduate and graduate students with a range of majors provided Kurkin and other students the opportunity to work with others outside of their usual classes.

“My favorite part of this trip is the community,” Kurkin said. “For me, I feel like a lot of these people in this room and who I’m working with aren’t people I’ve ever worked with [before].”

Side projects and new ventures

In addition to their required tasks, students had the opportunity to learn new skills and pursue side projects.

The digital production team, tasked with editing and uploading to  ESWGMedia.com nightly, took advantage of their free mornings to try out DSLR photography for the first time during Olympic-like events like the biathlon and luge.

Riley Fay, a broadcast and digital journalism (BDJ) junior, joined the team as an audio producer to report on stories for the WAER radio station. Though not a sports reporter, Fay came into the trip looking to do a story on an experienced speed skater from Cazenovia.

“To dive into how speed skating works and what the different divisions and races are and stuff like that is something very new for me,” said Fay, who, thanks to field reporting and interviews with athletes, coaches and local business owners, developed two more stories during the trip.

Snapping away

A partnership with SONY outfitted students with the company’s latest A9III camera kits designed to capture outdoor sports such as alpine skiing and biathlon as well as action-packed indoor events such as ice hockey and short-track speed skating. ThinkTank, a travel photography gear company, provided free camera bags made for sports photographers.

For students assigned to Whiteface, there was an added complexity in determining the best location to capture competitors as they zipped down the slopes while also traversing the mountain on skis, snowboards or sometimes simply by foot.

Visual communications junior Liam Kennedy spent two days at Whiteface shooting slalom, moguls, skiing and snowboard cross events.

“It was challenging not only to capture their speed but also to take photos in an interesting way and having to constantly move around while on a snowboard,” Kennedy said. “For me, the effort is what makes the images worth it.”

Final steps

As the competitions wound down each day, the Newhouse team shifted into production mode. Videographers edited down their individual footage into highlight reels that were then transformed into a daily sizzle reel for the Newhouse Sports Media Center and the Games’ social media accounts.

Photographers combed through thousands of photos from each event to narrow them down to a few dozen of their best images.

Once the photos were captioned, students handed off their final selections to the digital production team composed of BDJ senior Maurice “Mo” Holtzman and myself. We edited, uploaded and organized photos on ESWGMedia.com, where 1,700 images are available for media outlets, athletes and families to access for free.