Jeff Marsilio \u201901 CLAS was a basketball season-ticket holder during his undergraduate days at UConn, but never thought the sport would someday be his career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was an English and economics major,\u201d says Marsilio, who is now the Senior Vice President for New Media for the National Basketball Association. \u201cTo be honest, I didn\u2019t know what I wanted to do when I graduated. I thought to go into business and part of me thought I\u2019d end up being a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Marsilio pondered his options, he was intrigued to find out that David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA at the time, had a law degree. Marsilio ended up going to and graduating from the same law school as Stern did \u2013 Columbia.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like my education at UConn, even though I didn\u2019t necessarily know where it would take me, prepared me really well for what I ended up wanting to do,\u201d says the Guilford native.<\/p>\n
Marsilio has been with the NBA since 2015 and his role revolves around the development of the league\u2019s digital platforms, and how to keep fans connected through the internet, mobile devices, and other new, constantly evolving technologies.<\/p>\n
\u201cDigital has changed a lot in the years since I started working with it at the NBA, and our digital coverage has evolved with the times,\u201d says Marsilio.<\/p>\n
A new challenge came this past March, when the league suspended its season because of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery year we have an offseason, but this offseason came right in the middle of our season, unexpectedly, because we had to temporarily shut things down,\u201d says Marsilio. \u201cOur first priority was to make sure our fans were informed about all the various health issues. We came up with a content plan that leveraged our players and our partners to deliver that kind of educational information.<\/p>\n
Adds Marsilio: \u201cNumber two was – and over time, this came more and more to the forefront – making sure we were keeping our fans engaged and entertained. Even though we didn\u2019t have games and we weren\u2019t distributing highlights from current games, we created content that drew on our vast archives that go back decades. We also drew on our players, who were still thinking about basketball wherever they were in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NBA resumed its season at the end of July, but instead of playing in packed arenas around the country, the league created an isolation \u201cbubble\u201d in Orlando, Fla., and games are now played without any fans in attendance.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur focus has been to give fans at home as much a sense of being close to the action as possible,\u201d says Marsilio, who continues to work out of New York City. \u201cDigital makes that all possible, and we have done it in a variety of ways. My role is to manage a team of people that connect the league with the community, direct the content we create, and contribute generally to the overall strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Virtual signage<\/a> and digital overlays<\/a> are some of the ways the league is enhancing the ways games are shown during a broadcast.<\/p>\n \u201cThe game is presented in a new way to somewhat make up for the fact that we are not in a typical arena,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The social justice issues that are everywhere in the country this summer have also played a prominent role in the NBA\u2019s return to action.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s something that is very important to the league and has been part of our strategy,\u201d says Marsilio. \u201cIt\u2019s something that has been true of us for a long time, just now it is really at the forefront.\u201d<\/p>\n Marsilio believes the way sports in consumed by people may change somewhat when the pandemic ends.<\/p>\n \u201cI think sports will be as important as ever,\u201d he says. \u201cBut, I think some of these technologies we have developed will be useful going forward and will continue to use after COVID-19 is over. There are certain technologies we had to accelerate because of the changes COVID-19 brought on, and they will continue to be useful. We are learning a lot about what is possible and what is important to fans.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople have connected with other people in different ways during these times. They are watching things together, even if they are not together. I think we can tap more and more into that. People are feeling like they are together in some respects as they remotely watch our games.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jeff Marsilio \u201901 CLAS was a basketball season ticket holder during his undergraduate days at UConn, but never thought that the sport would someday be his career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":163907,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1712,2226,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2113],"class_list":["post-163904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","category-clas","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-08 16:00:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163904"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164081,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163904\/revisions\/164081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/163907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163904"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=163904"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=163904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}