Most Texas football fans know quarterback Arch Manning had a signature Saturday night on the field. Grant Wild, a UT radio-television-film major from Little Rock, had an equally sensational performance high above Royal-Memorial Stadium.
Armed with his Sony a7R IV, Wild captured a photographic moment that should become an instant Texas classic. If they hang famous photos in the Louvre, this should go straight into the trophy room inside the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor.
With one shot, Wild captured and crystallized everything the UT athletic department has been trying to do for years — turn Texas football games into must-experience-to-believe events worthy of fans’ entertainment dollar.
The gameday experience in Austin has advanced so far beyond waiving cellphone flashlights to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” That memorable moment from the 2018 game against Iowa State feels quaint compared to what Texas did Saturday night.
Texas ex Nils Thorjussen oversaw an array of pyrotechnic-firing drones hovering outside the stadium’s east wall over the adjacent soccer field in the shape of the Longhorn silhouette logo. Thorjussen's company Verge Aero was the first in the United States approved to use pyrotechnics with drones. They first tried it out with a flyover Lady Bird Lake the night of July 1.
With drones flying, fireworks began shooting off atop the south score board. Orange smoke canisters were triggered on the field, giving the place a fog-fueled, rock-concert like feel.
Wild has his 16mm lens with a F-stop at 3.2, just the right aperture for night photos under LED stadium lights. His 1/200 shutter speed would capture a crisp, sharp image. The result was just as eye-popping as Manning’s five touchdowns.
“He got a phenomenal shot,” UT senior associate athletic director Caten Hyde said Sunday. “I asked him what were your thoughts after, and he just basically said, ‘Yeah, I think they’re going to like this one.’”
Time to add something new to Wild's online portfolio.
Transforming the gameday atmosphere
On Sunday, the Texas football program learned it had climbed to the No. 1 spot in the Associated Press Top 25 poll for the first time since 2008. Texas didn’t fall into mediocrity overnight, and coach Steve Sarkisian didn’t engineer the program’s resurrection in similar fashion. It took years.
School officials have spent years cultivating and developing the atmosphere inside Royal-Memorial Stadium for years, too.
Since arriving in 2017, Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte has said repeatedly that he cannot control what happens on the field. “But I can control everything that happens around it.”
Del Conte and his longtime lieutenant Drew Martin have literally spent years working on the in-game experience. They upgraded the food, the drinks, the speakers and the lights. They spent $175 million to reconstruct the entire south end zone, putting in a new club and floor suites.
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This summer, Texas athletics essentially tore apart and remodeled the UT Club on the east side, making it more exclusive in the process, and upgraded the in-stadium wifi.
Martin hired Houston Rockets public address announcer Jonathan Sanford to bring more energy. The whole in-game production has a polished feel. It helps that the product on the field is better, too.
As a result, every home game for the 2024 season is sold out, an athletic director’s dream. Going into the SEC doesn’t hurt, either.
“First of all, I want to give a shout-out to our fans and our crowd, our students,” Sarkisian said after the Colorado State win. “They were rocking.”
UT’s student creative team driving social media
Athletic department officials have energized the whole atmosphere. But how do you broadcast that to the public? That’s where Texas’ expansive social media team comes into play.
Hyde came to Texas from TCU in May 2019. Now overseeing creative development and video production, Hyde leads a full student internship program of 35-40 UT students. Anywhere from 10-15 students staff football games.
It’s a far cry from five years ago when student Angela Wang was literally “the lone solider, the lone intern,” Hyde said. Wang was famous inside UT athletics. If there was a game, she was there, shooting anything or anyone that moved. Now, UT has an army.
“To see the investment and growth in students is just really exciting,” Hyde said.
Like a football team prepares, the Longhorns’ creative team has game-planning meetings. Devin Kane, the director of social strategy and creative development, oversees Friday meetings where the team formulates shot lists in 15-minute time blocks throughout the football game.
Kane is akin to the department’s “offensive coordinator,” Hyde said.
The team knew that with drones, fireworks and smoke, there was a chance to get something good between the third and fourth quarters. That moment, Hyde said, “is kind of an exclamation point moment.” Hyde chose Wild because, frankly, he’d earned the assignment.
Wild once told Voyage Austin that he was “a short mixed Asian kid with a bowl cut who had no particular set of skills yet a vast range of interests.” He got a camera as a graduation gift in May 2021 and began shooting sports. Wild has since grown into the top men’s basketball shooter in the student program, Hyde said.
So Hyde dispatched Wild to the northwest corner of DKR. If you’re standing on the field looking up, Wild was positioned over the Dell Technologies sign.
The UT creative department has a group text and word of Wild’s image went, well, wild. It quickly went up on the Texas Athletics main social media account and drew 5,000 likes.
It’s a stunning image, no doubt, one every bit as impressive as the No. 1 team in college football. And it was taken by a student photographer, just like the students wearing helmets and shoulder pads.
“Truthfully, the shots are a little tricky,” Hyde said. “He nailed the settings, the pyro fires there at the end, just an awesome shot.”
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