Sarina Soriano, Senior Producer for the San Francisco 49ers

What does a regular week during the season look like for you? And what does game day look like?

There’s nothing like being in regular season. I’ll start with the game day. My team and I — we arrive five hours early to the stadium before kickoff. We’re mic’ing up the pads for the players who are Mic’d Up that game. We’re setting up GoPros in our radio booths. We’re getting all of our camera gear ready to go. Each one of us has an assignment. We’re filming our players arriving to the stadium, and we’re putting out edits. We then film optional dynamic warmups and pregame — and getting out all those edits — and, finally, the best part of the day is filming highlights of the game itself, all our fans and the atmosphere. I would say we wrap up our day around two hours after the game has actually ended, because we have to film pressers and postgame content.

Once we have all of this footage — that’s four or five people shooting for most of the game, so it’s hours and hours of footage — we spend Monday logging. We’re trying to see the bigger picture and what story we can tell in our 49 Hours series of game recaps, probably our biggest flagship series we have in the marketing department, but we have various other video series that we put out throughout the week. I would say it’s a little bit like a Groundhog Day. We know exactly when each video needs to go out each week, and then sprinkle those in with some community relation events, pressers and maybe some other off-shoots that come up from our PR team or with our players. We’re constantly moving, constantly going, but at the end of the day, we all really care about our art and telling the story of the team to our fans.

Who are you mainly working with?

So we have a web team, social team, we have our reporter Lindsey Pallares, myself and 49ers Studios. On game days, we’re working a lot with just our teams. However, everything that we do connects. Every part of the marketing department. So, if I’m putting out 49 Hours on a Wednesday, web needs to know what time that publishes. YouTube needs to know, and we’re making images for our social team to help promote the piece. So, we all do very different things, however, everything that we do is very cohesive in regards to putting out the best content at the best time in the best light for our fans to enjoy.

You are the first female senior producer for the 49ers. What challenges have you faced?

Early on in my career, I think the biggest challenge for me was probably — and I still deal with it a lot today, though — is imposter syndrome. I’m a 5-foot-3 Latina from East Side San Jose, California, and here I am in this giant stadium with creators and people who don’t really look like me. So to me, I felt I really had to be twice as excellent, if that makes sense. I felt that I had to really prove myself that, “Hey, I can do this, too. I belong here as well.” And it’s so cool to see the shift of women in marketing in general, but also as reporters, as photographers, and to see women really looking out for each other on social media. I really think that’s why representation is so important. You see someone who looks like you, and you’re like, “That’s definitely something that I can accomplish. If they can do it, I can, too.” I just hope that when people hear my story, that’s exactly how they feel. It doesn’t matter where you come from; if you have a goal and a dream, you got to stick to that.

I think, too, just the physical challenge of it all. We are constantly on the move. Physically, I have a 30-to-35-pound camera on my shoulder that I rock all game day, and I’m flying to away games, sometimes on the East Coast, on Fridays for game day. That same night after a game, we’re flying back home, and on Monday, I have to be able to turn on my creativity. I think that’s so hard, just as a creative in general, where you want to create so many things, but you’re physically and mentally exhausted. It’s super hard as a creative to always be on. So that’s definitely one of my biggest challenges today as a leader is trying to continue to express myself through my art — even on the days where you work a whole game day.