Sports Emmy Award

The Sports Emmy Awards are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in recognition of excellence in American sports television programming, including sports-related series, live coverage of sporting events, and best sports announcers. The awards ceremony, presenting Emmys from the previous calendar year, is usually held on a Spring Monday night, sometime in the last two weeks in April or the first week in May. The Sports Emmy Awards are all given away at one ceremony, unlike the Primetime Emmy Awards and the Daytime Emmy Awards, which hold a "Creative Arts" ceremony in which Emmys are given to behind-the-scenes personnel.

History

The first Emmy for "Best Sports Coverage" was handed out at the second annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony in 1950, where KTLA, a local television station in Los Angeles, won the award for coverage of baseball. The following year, another Los Angeles-based station, KNBH, won an Emmy for their coverage of the Los Angeles Rams American football team. At the seventh Primetime Emmys in 1955, NBC became the first major network to win a Sports Emmy Award for its series, the "Gillette Cavalcade of Sports".

In 1979, an Emmys exclusively for sports coverage was held for the first time at the Rainbow Room in New York City. Winners included golf announcer Jack Whitaker, and CBS's "The NFL Today". The ninth annual Sports Emmy Awards, hosted by actors Alan Thicke and Joan Van Ark and held on July 13 1988, became the first Sports Emmys ceremony to be televised; the live telecast was syndicated nationwide by Raycom Sports. Dennis Miller hosted in the 12th Sports Emmys in 1991, which was broadcast on ESPN.

Categories

At that inaugural ceremony in 1979, there were 12 categories. At the 2007 ceremony, there will be 30:
*Outstanding Live Sports Special
*Outstanding Live Sports Series
*Outstanding Live Event Turnaround
*Outstanding Edited Sports Special
*Outstanding Sports Documentary
*Outstanding Edited Sports Series/Anthology
*Outstanding Studio Show - Weekly
*Outstanding Studio Show - Daily
*Outstanding Sports Personality, Studio Host
*Outstanding Sports Personality, Play-by-Play
*Outstanding Sports Personality, Studio Analyst
*Outstanding Sports Personality, Sports Event Analyst
*Outstanding Technical Team Remote
*Outstanding Technical Team Studio
*Outstanding Camera Work
*Outstanding Editing
*The Dick Schaap Outstanding Writing Award
*Outstanding Music Composition/Direction/Lyrics
*Outstanding Live Event Audio/Sound
*Outstanding Post Produced Audio/Sound
*Outstanding Graphic Design
*Outstanding Production Design/Art Direction
*George Wensel Outstanding Innovative Technical Achievement Award
*Outstanding Sports Journalism
*Outstanding Short Feature
*Outstanding Long Feature
*Outstanding Open/Tease
*Outstanding New Approaches, Coverage
*Outstanding New Approaches, Long Form
*Outstanding New Approaches, General Interest
*Sports Lifetime Achievement Award

Defunct categories

*Outstanding Host or Commentator
*Outstanding Analyst
*Outstanding Achievement In Content For Non-Traditional Delivery Platforms
**This award made its debut in 2006, and was given for content made especially for devices such as iPods and PDAs. It was replaced by the three subcategories for Outstanding Broadband, which are listed above.

External links

* [http://www.emmyonline.org/sports/ Sports Emmy Awards homepage]
* [http://emmyonline.org/mediacenter/sports_28th_winners.html A recap and complete list of winners for the 2007 awards ceremony]