The engine of the New York Yankees’ social-media team, Julia Schorr (left) with Ryan Callahan (right). (Photo courtesy of the New York Yankees)
Almost daily, a new video from the New York Yankees’ TikTok account asks players various questions as they walk into the team’s facilities at spring training down in Tampa, FL.
“Which teammate would you not want to sit next to on the team plane?”
“What was your favorite childhood TV show?”
They show Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Juan Soto joking around. There is a look at Anthony Volpe putting in extra fielding work at shortstop or Gerrit Cole loosening up during a bullpen session.
But who is working behind the camera to make all of this content?
Ryan Callahan, who went to DeSales University for TV/film, spent hours carefully splicing video together, which directly transferred to a job with the NBA media center where he logged games, edited highlights for the associated social channels, and produced a nightly Snapchat show. Even with all that, social media was not the omnipresent giant force the way it is now.
“When I graduated college in 2017, social media wasn’t really a course you could take,” Callahan told amNewYork. “So really through my work as a editor and understanding my platforms at the NBA, what should go on what channels, vertical, square [or] wide content, where it should live, that’s kind of where my understanding of all that came.”
While Callahan took a similar job with the Yankees in 2019, a year later he relied heavily on the film fundamentals from school: longer form videos and packages, and saw an almost instant payoff in his first project with the Yankees where he wrote the script for the tribute video dedicated to Derek Jeter after he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I grew up idolizing Derek Jeter so to have a project to write a script for a video, telling the story of Derek’s career, I sat down and wrote that story from the heart of 12-year-old…
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