Dave Evans is a nine-time Emmy award winner from the sports broadcasting world. He spent 14 seasons as a broadcast executive with the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise, and almost a decade with Fox Sports, where he ran all aspects of NBA Broadcasting for the Southwest, Oklahoma, and New Orleans regional networks. He served almost a decade on the NBA Broadcast Advisory Board. Evans is also an Adjunct Professor of Sports Broadcasting at Baylor University. He has sat on panels with Hollywood cinematographers, Pixar animators, and even NASA astronauts. But in 2022, Evans left the sports world for a “higher calling,” and is now the Executive Director of Creek Media at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen, Texas. He tells us how his love of technology evolved and about how his broadcasting world and church world collided in this Five Minutes.
CPM: Where did you get your interest in AV or technical arts?
Evans: When I finished high school, I wanted to be a sports radio play-by-play announcer, and I had the opportunity to do some of that while in college at Baylor. That is a hard occupation to break into, so after graduation I took a production job at the CBS affiliate in Waco, Texas. Over time, I fell in love with the production side of the business. I was given the opportunity to produce some sports programming while at the station and I realized that I was pretty good at producing and directing – and that I was getting the same satisfaction from producing sports programming as I would being an announcer, if not more.
I guess you could call it a discovery of an “alternate passion,” where I fell in love with the production side of the business and the creative outlet it provides. Instead of just telling the story as an announcer, I was involved in telling the story visually, with many more layers of creativity.
CPM: When did your love of tech collide with the church?
Evans: That really didn’t happen until 2019 when I directed our church’s Easter services for the first time. At that time, we had been at our church (Cottonwood Creek in Allen, Texas) for over 20 years, but all of my service to the church was in other areas. I was a trustee, a deacon, and a weekly Bible study teacher. Despite my background in the broadcast industry, I had never served the church in that way, and really hadn’t given much thought to “church media.” I honestly didn’t want to be involved in the same type things at church on Sunday that I was involved in professionally. The Bible teaching and other areas of church service were meaningful endeavors that I considered an escape from the broadcast world.
In 2018, I had decided to scale back from teaching Bible study classes every week. Then in 2019, the church needed an IMAG and livestream director for those previously mentioned Easter services. From there, I started alternating between directing and teaching. Then, the pandemic hit and I was directing almost every week. I enjoyed the opportunity this gave me to actually direct a broadcast, something I had not done regularly in many years since moving to the executive side of the broadcast business.
CPM: Tell us about your decision to leave an illustrious secular broadcasting career to work for the church.
Evans: When I was asked to come on staff at the church it completely caught me off guard. I was not looking to immediately leave the sports broadcasting business. However, I was starting to think about retirement and what that would look like. I knew I didn’t want to just golf and fish when I retired. I had been thinking about, and actually had started working on, some entrepreneurial projects that I felt would become the next iteration of my professional life. So, I guess I had already been emotionally preparing to leave the sports business. And, it helped that there was not anything I felt I needed to further accomplish in that business.
So, when the church opportunity presented itself, it was really God answering my prayers about this next phase of my life. And it was a perfect fit in still allowing me some flexibility to pursue some of these other projects I had started working on. I will say that it was weird at first to be on staff at the church I had attended for 25 years, but it is really amazing to see how God has blessed through this change, and I am really grateful for that.
CPM: You are in charge of all production in a large church. Tell us about your role.
Evans: In the process of becoming more involved in our church media ministry as a volunteer, I was becoming more familiar with “church media.” I began to realize that all church media was becoming (if not, needing to become) the same professional level as that of network television and Hollywood moviemaking.
Ironically, not long after this, I was approached by our executive pastor who said that the media operation at the church was becoming larger than they had ever imagined and needed someone with my experience to run it. At that point, something happened that I never imagined – being asked to come on staff to oversee the growth that was happening.
With that in mind, my role is to keep our church’s media operation on pace with the tremendous growth we are currently experiencing in terms of attendance and online reach at our church. This means putting an effective organizational structure in place, increasing production value by staying on the forefront of technology, and creating more meaningful content that tells the story of what is happening at our church.
One of the first things we did when I arrived on staff in April of 2022 was to brand our department as Creek Media. I was soon given that added responsibility of overseeing our communications department, which now falls under the Creek Media umbrella. The overall talent we have in our combined groups has better positioned us to reach people not only through live online church services and social media, but also through the aggressive creation of content, such as documentary storytelling. We are just now at the precipice of this added content creation, so it’s really an exciting time in our department and at our church.
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CPM: Do you have a favorite skill or piece of equipment you love to use?
Evans: I am a director at heart. Obviously, my career came to the point many years ago where I was hiring the directors instead of being the director, and that is still really the case. But it is fun to jump back in the saddle from time-to-time. I love where the technology has gone with video switchers and systems. We’ve just acquired the Panasonic Kairos system, and it has been a game changer for us.
I also really like any good camera that makes good pictures that allow for a lot of flexibility in post-production.
CPM: What advice do you have for smaller churches trying to build an AV ministry?
Evans: It all starts with your volunteers. They are the life blood of church media ministries. We’ve developed and grown our volunteer and contractor base over the past year, but we still have a long way to go. When you have a strong volunteer base, you don’t just have a crew, you have a close-knit ministry.
The other thing I would say is you need to find a good, solid AVL engineering and operations person. You can put together an equipment package that gives you some nice capabilities, but if you don’t have the person capable to maintaining, fixing, and/or troubleshooting that equipment, you could be in a world of hurt any given Sunday (sorry, considering my background I had to throw in that sports reference).
Meet and learn from Dave Evans in person at Capture Summit '23 in Dallas, Aug. 7-9!
Join Capture Summit session speaker Dave Evans and dozens of expert presenters, along with hundreds of your fellow creatives for a deep-dive into everything from filmmaking, video editing, lighting, streaming, audio, IMAG, to leveraging social media, building an inspired team, and fueling the creative process—it's all happening at Capture Summit '23 - the 7th Annual Content Creation & Filmmaking Summit hosted at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen, Texas.
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