Creating an audio community: How teamwork makes the dream work for the Sound Queens of sports broadcast
Lucy Moss, BBC Sport Operations Executive, sound and comms lead, Hazel DeAyr, Freelance Sound Assistant, and Sky Sports Sound Team Leader Rachel Oliver, discuss the need for increasing the diversity of crews in sports broadcasting sound, as well as keeping those people in the industry and championing them on their way up the career ladder, at the Sports Audio Summit 2024
In live sports, being part of a team is essential. It’s kind of its thing. But working as a team is not solely the preserve of the playing field and for some, like sound assistant Jo Salisbury, teamwork is not just part of the job; it is the best part of the job.
Marking 25 years in sound and more than three decades in the broadcast industry, Salisbury started her career as a tech op for Channel 4 in 1992, before moving into a role with a facilities house. It was very a different atmosphere.
“I did not like it at all,” says Salisbury now. “This culture of blame and not working as a team. It was horrible.”
Discovering the world of outside broadcast was a breath of fresh air, and today Salisbury is widely regarded as one of the best team players around. Following a stint at BBC Radio in 2000, Salisbury is best known for her work as an A2 and has worked on a range of sports as well as opera, politics and news. She was Sue Barker’s personal sound assistant at Wimbledon for 14 years and this year alone she has been part of IMG’s team at the Saudi Cup, covered the FA Cup in Crystal Palace for Timeline, and worked on the Women’s Super League in Crawley for Vivid Broadcast.
Audio expert and co-founder of Sound Queens, Jo Salisbury, at the Saudi Cup
Non-negotiable
Being part of a team, she says, is non-negotiable when it comes to being able to address all the challenges required to deliver a live broadcast, and over the last 12 months she has been quietly building one of the biggest teams in the UK audio freelance industry.
On 28 February 2024, Salisbury and fellow freelancer Jemma Scotter started the Sound Queens WhatsApp group as an unofficial job board. Today it is much more than that, having grown into a community for over 100 female sound engineers, and is described by Salisbury as, “genuinely one of the best things I have ever done in my career”.
“There have been so many times that I am contacted by someone needing a woman for a specific job and I have been unavailable,” she says. “Early in 2024 somebody had posted a message looking for a female boom op to work the stage at the Globe, and while I knew of a few people to recommend, often they were also booked. So Jemma and I set up a WhatsApp group called Sound Queens to advertise these jobs when they come up and I honestly thought there’d be six of us who would message once or twice a year to check each other’s availability.”
Sound assistant Jo Salisbury at Wimbledon
The group now has over 120 members, from boom ops to guarantee engineers to people just starting out. But not everyone in the group is looking for work.
“It’s an incredible resource for women and we have a huge range of people,” says Salisbury. “We’ve got people like Anna Patching, who is manager of broadcast engineering, AMP operations at Apple; Pam Barnes, who’s head of sound at Cloudbass; BBC Sport’s Lucy Moss [BBC Sport operations executive, sound and comms lead]. And at the other end of the scale are people just starting in the industry asking for advice on how to hold a boom for an hour. The advice is always right there: “Try this Pilates class, try this belt, I found this helpful…
“Every now and again, somebody will advertise a job on the group, but it’s become a much more about developing a supportive community. For example, this morning, somebody posted that their 18 year old daughter has deferred her university place, is trying to get into the sound industry and would welcome any advice. Already, six people have texted back. That is what it is all about, it’s about being part of a team, part of a community.”
Supporting the industry
It is a recurring theme in the broadcast industry. In a session on diversity and inclusion at last year’s SVG Europe Audio Summit in London, freelance sound assistant Hazel DeAyr vocalised the need for a more inclusive and supportive approach.
“I’m a freelancer; I don’t have a place where I can have formal, everyday training,” she said as part of a panel which included Moss as well as Sky Sports sound team leader Rachel Oliver. “I need the support to enable me to develop. There are policies from companies that say they’re going to do this, but you have to follow it through. You can’t just do the training at the entry level.”
In many ways, the Sound Queens group helps to plug some of the gap, and it is no surprise that Salisbury was in the audience that day.
“Things have definitely changed for the better, and England winning the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 final in 2022 make a big difference,” she says. “For a start, broadcasters actively went out of their way to try and crew it with women and there is a much bigger focus on women’s sport.
“But it also meant that we were suddenly meeting other women on the crew, and I’ve come across quite a few women who feel like they’re the only one in the industry. Being a woman in this industry can be isolating because women tend not to be rostered on together. Last year – 2024 – was the first time in my career when there were three women together on the floor, and every now and again you still hear about a crew that doesn’t need another woman on the sound crew because, “they’ve already got one”. Like our breasts will fall off if we’re in the same room together.”
Widening the net
Diversity continues to be a focus for broadcasting, whether that’s around gender, age, ethnicity or experience. It’s an ongoing challenge and it makes the creation of supportive communities like Sound Queens all the more important. Given the nature of the work, Salisbury believes, community and working together as a team is what always makes the difference.
“I’ve been working in broadcast for 35 years, and I’m very good at what I do, but there are still massive gaps in my knowledge,” admits Salisbury. “I know I’m very vocal about all this, but it really is all about the team and that’s what I love about it. Identifying where the problem is and finding ways to fix it is all about having trust in your colleagues. It sounds ridiculous, but in sound, communication is genuinely the most important thing.
“I love it when something goes wrong, like when your radio mics aren’t working and it becomes about problem solving, and while the audio guarantee is ringing JFMG to assign new frequencies in the UK, you are changing them over on the floor.”
It not only allows the crew to work together to resolve the range of issues that come up during live productions, but it fosters a sense of community that is especially valuable for people who may otherwise feel isolated. And while the teamwork and camaraderie Salisbury experiences on location in sports productions is one of the aspects she enjoys most about her work, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t extend outside of each job.
Jo Salisbury keeping the presenters on the straight and narrow at the rugby
No limits
“Whether people can see it or not, diversity always helps because it means that the best people end up end up in the right jobs.
“When I started in the industry, I just made it up as I went along and if I didn’t know anything, I asked. I was lucky to come across the right people in the industry, mostly through BBC Outside Broadcasts, and sound supervisors like Andy Payne, Tim Davies and Andy James all helped me progress. That’s how I became a sound assistant.
“I think what’s most concerning me is that now there is no longer a pipeline between an A2 to becoming a guarantee to a deputy sound supervisor. Where there used to be a clear path, those guarantee engineers today aren’t necessarily audio people and are not guaranteed to move on to be sound supervisors. They’re often the most important person on the job, but often they are systems engineers, and they’ve got no interest in mixing.”
It makes community-driven groups like Sound Queens all the more important. And that goes for everyone.
“Every male sound engineer I’ve spoken to about the Sound Queens group has agreed that it is a really good idea and some have suggested that they should start one for men. And they absolutely should.”
If the Sound Queens WhatsApp group sounds like a good idea to you, message Salisbury or Scotter on LinkedIn for more details