Logan Fry blends in with any other person holding a camera on the sideline or baseline of a Hilltoppers’ athletic event.

Often mistaken as a standard sports photographer, the frames captured on his DSLR device are moving, not still. It’s his current work behind the lens is keeping the image of Western Kentucky athletics moving forward during a waiting period for sports to resume.

“This is still so crazy to me,” Fry said. “I’m a behind the camera guy. I don’t like the limelight.”

Sorry, Logan. The camera is on you now.

For over a month now, sports have been non-existent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The cancellation of all organized and voluntary team activities has left WKU’s athletic facilities empty of players and spectators. But even before campus athletics were suspended, Fry’s efforts were bringing a new element to the exposure of WKU sports. Quick turnarounds of highlight tape, hype videos leading into a game and even the clips that bring wide ranges of emotion, Fry has been behind the camera for it all to tell the same story from a different perspective.

Those efforts are especially magnified on social media when his videos are helping keep the athletics image active in an uncertain era of their return.

“I’m glad for the sake of what the content is that people are seeing it, but I don’t want to be heralded as some type of hero,” Fry said. “The story has already happened, I’m just assembling it.”

Fry’s official role is creative content producer working between the WKU athletics and marketing departments as well as WKYU PBS. A product of Calloway County High School, he worked for WKYU PBS and the Hilltopper Sports Satellite Network all four years as a student. Upon graduating, he was hired to take on the newly created position as an in-house producer of video recaps for all sports, plus player profile and other visual elements that in the past would come through a third-party service and take days to complete.

Now WKU’s media relations and marketing staff can form ideas and Fry has it complete within hours. With the in-person recruiting dead period still in play for coaches until the end of May, teams have used Fry’s work to showcase facilities for recruiting purposes.

This time of social distancing and longing for sports’ return has put Fry’s work front and center of anything athletics related.

“I think Logan is one of the most valuable employees in our athletic department right now,” WKU’s associate athletic director for communications Zach Greenwell said. “We don’t have the typical ways to trust to tell stories, our coaches don’t have the typical ways to show off campus and show what we’re all about, whether that’s official visits or those different things. All the ideas we can come up with to showcase our university and athletic department start with Logan.

“I just don’t know that we have anybody right now that’s more valuable in terms of making sure we stay relevant and aware that we’re able to continue to do right by everyone in our athletic department than Logan.”

Fry’s work is most recognizable on social media with 30 to 45 second highlight videos after a WKU football, men’s or women’s basketball game. But he produced the same work for every other program.

“Some of the impact he’s made is to the sports that don’t get that exposure,” WKU’s associate athletic director for marketing Olivia Higgins said. “Now you’re seeing a recap of every single soccer match and that wasn’t something of the norm. It’s helped out our smaller sports for their exposure and even their recruiting. We get content up, but really that helps recruiting for our programs as well.”

And he’s also the point of contact when help is needed between marketing and the WKYU PBS crew that produces television broadcasts. Jordan Basham is the production manager for WKU’s PBS crew that normally produces game broadcasts. Fry began working for Basham as a student and now has become a peer in helping set up and coordinate production.

“Our ability to make his position dedicated is something we’ve never really been able to do before,” Basham said. “I filled it as a sports producer, but I still didn’t just do sports. Not that when I did stuff that it failed, but it’s such a hyper focus and that’s the concept of this position that’s easily proven itself in the last six months.

“It’s given us another layer. Twelve months ago, this was not the type of content athletics was putting out there. They were putting out really good stuff, but the frequency and quality has moved up too just because of the way sports info has interacted with him.”

Beyond the highlights, Fry helps Higgins with any video-related content played on the new videoboards in Diddle Arena for in-game promotions, which has included player spotlight series for volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball.

Fry said one of his favorite projects was a four-minute video documenting the final events of WKU basketball’s overtime win over previously-unbeaten Arkansas. Charles Bassey’s season-ending injury, Jared Savage’s game-tying 3-pointer and Taveion Hollingsworth’s fast-break scores highlighted a mashup with the radio call from Randy Lee and Hal Schmitt to create an emotional video unlike the department has produced in-house.

“No one asked me to work on that,” Fry said. “I just thought it needed to be done. … Without Zach giving me some creative vision, without Randy and Hal making those calls and the team making those plays, all that has to come together before I can even begin to make this type of story.”

Those products during the year set the stage for expectations Fry set for himself when sports on campus came to a halt in mid-March. The fun projects have garnered the most fan interaction in response to SiriusXM’s creation of a mascot bracket challenge that was originally intended for Power 5 mascots.

But fan reaction convinced SiriusXM to place Big Red in the bracket, and now WKU’s mascot is in the championship against Brigham Young University’s Cosmo the Cougar. With each round, Fry and WKU’s media and marketing department has produced creative celebratory videos with Big Red.

“This Big Red campaign as a whole has been really fun to work on,” Fry said.

The same day his first video of the Big Red voting campaign was released, he shared a clip highlighting the features of empty athletic facilities over radio broadcasts respective to each field or event.

During peak sports seasons or in a pandemic without sports, Fry has produced content keeping athletics relevant in a time when fans crave it most.

“That’s kind of the underlying thing that all these projects are doing, is adding hope,” Basham said. “It’s a mix of escape from their new normal and they’re providing some hope. The facilities video, the ‘Stay Safe, Hilltopper Nation’ video, it was such an emotional connection to those images.

“Nobody wants to see an empty Diddle, but when that video came out, I don’t know if there was any more powerful of an image I saw that day than those of the athletic facilities. Not empty, just waiting. We’re all waiting, but they’re waiting, too.”{&end}