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“I knew I wanted to work in TV,” Shaw said. “And this was a way to kind of stay involved in sports.”

Shaw moved to Meigs County from North Carolina when he was 10 years old and graduated from Ohio University with a video production degree in 2007. Beginning in his college years, Shaw’s sports television career took off with steady speed.

Shaw served as assistant athletic director for Multimedia Marketing at OU Athletics, and is now the chief videographer and editor at WOUB.

Shaw said he first found his niche as a sports videographer during college with WOUB and the network’s weekly show “Gridiron Glory,” which covers high school football in the Southeast Ohio and Northwest West Virginia regions during the season. Shaw received his first Emmy award as director for “Gridiron Glory” from the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences’ Ohio Valley Regional Chapter in 2006.

“During my senior year, I would shoot a high school game on Friday afternoon, then I’d shoot a college game on Saturday and then fly somewhere and shoot an NFL game on Sunday,” Shaw said.

Working long hours on a tight schedule didn’t stop with shooting games though. Shaw also created and produced two reality television series: “Relentless: An Inside Look at Ohio Football” and “All In: An Inside Look at Ohio Basketball,” which was changed to “Attack U:” for its second season.

Shaw said he and his team averaged 120 hours a week to produce “Relentless” and about 100 hours a week to produce “All In”—sometimes working 36-hour days to get the job done.

“People see a 20-minute show, and they don’t realize all the work that goes into it,” he said.

Shaw said he initially got the inspiration for the reality shows from connections with his friends who work for NFL’s and HBO’s “Hard Knocks.”

“I wanted to kind of take that and bring it here and see if we could do an interesting show,” Shaw said. “It gave fans a chance to get to know the players more than just seeing them on the field, because when they have a helmet on you don’t really know who they are. It’s a chance to show that these kids are human. They’re just normal people.”

Shaw said building relationships and trust with the players so that they feel they can open up in order to share a moving story is a key skill for a videographer.

“I like being able to tell the story. That’s something I’ve always enjoyed,” he said. “I like going out and finding the opportunities to tell people something they didn’t already know. And I like being able to move people. I like being able to do something to create emotion in somebody.”

Shaw also had the opportunity to work as assistant cameraman at Super Bowl XLII, and his footage has been used for national networks such as NBC, ABC and ESPN.

Other Emmys Shaw has received include Sports Photography in 2008, Sports Feature (for “A Closer Look: Ohio Football ”) in 2009 and Sports Editor in 2010. Shaw has been nominated for 12 Emmy awards total in his sports television career.

Shaw said Emmy nominations and awards serve as a sense of justification that he and his peers are doing quality work.

“It’s not guaranteed. It doesn’t happen every year. The key is, I don’t go into it thinking, ‘I’m going to win an Emmy with this.’ Cause if you do that you’re never going to get it,” he said. “The focus is always: ‘What would make this the absolute best piece?’”

This year, Shaw was nominated for five categories, four of which his two assistants, Chris Sabo and Sean Fisher, were also nominated for. The videographers represented both Ohio Athletics and WOUB.

The categories they are nominated for include best Sports Daily or Weekly Program (for “Relentless:”), Sports Program Feature/Segment (for the Scotty Hasting Story), Sports Editing Composite and Sports Photography Composite. Shaw was also nominated for best Sports Director Post-Production (for “Relentless.”)

“I’m more excited for Chris and Sean because it’s their first time,” Shaw said. “If we didn’t get nominated this year, I would have felt like I let them down probably.”

Shaw said his supervisors, Jim Schaus, Tom Hodson and Dan Hauser, are important influences in his sports videography career.

“(Emmy nominations) wouldn’t happen without people like that letting me do this. They’ve given me the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I couldn’t thank them enough for the opportunities,” he said.