Courtesy Los Angeles Daily News

(March 13, 2009) Donna Moskal tried to wedge her way through the open door to the Staples Center's 300-level broadcast booth on Saturday morning, about two hours before the Fox Sports West telecast of the Kings-Minnesota NHL game, but something stopped her.

Three high-backed chairs - those vital to the comfort and well being of the play-by-play man, analyst and stat man - were chained together at the base by a cable, nearly blocking the entrance.

"I've never seen that before," said Moskal, the production crew stage manager, as she maneuvered around them.

And she's been doing this for 15 years.

Her resourcefulness and unflappability were called into action right away. Moskal summoned a lighting crew member, who said he would call downstairs to security to come up and get the chairs unlocked.

Kings broadcasters Bob Miller and Jim Fox knew nothing about it when they arrived at the booth about an hour later to begin taping the show's intro and voicing over commercial spots.

But that's the point. Everything looked as if was all as it was supposed to be.

Damage control is one of the primary roles of a live game stage manager for a sports event - not unlike what a stage manager would do for a theatrical production. Making sure everything's in its proper place. And functional. And there's no disasters waiting to happen.

For Moskal, it's not all that much different from being a Stevenson Ranch mother of kids aged 15, 12, 10 and 9.

"It's not really babysitting, but, sure there are a lot of `mom jobs' that carry over to this," said Moskal, a Granada Hills High and Cal State Northridge graduate whose husband, Tony, is a teacher and head golf coach at Golden Valley High in Santa Clarita as well as a broadcaster on high school football.

"It's about pacifying a situation, making sure everything is in the right spot. A lot of things can and do go wrong before and during a broadcast, but you can't panic. It'll get fixed. The people who look and sound great on the air make it look easy, but the viewers never really see the other people behind the scenes."

As the eyes, ears and fix-it-now person in the booth in place of the game telecast producer who's back in the truck, the stage manager's multi-tasking efforts during a 10-hour shift run the gamut. The Telestrators and various TV monitors in the booth can't have any strange humming sounds. Neither can the headsets or microphones. The lights have to be properly lit and functional. All the scripts the broadcasters have to read live need to be proofread, in the right order.

There's plenty of bottled water, throat lozenges and a backup pair of reading glasses nearby.

Then - maybe most important - before the broadcasters look into the camera for that live shot, they are the last line of defense to make sure the ties and collars are straight, there's no lint on the jackets and no broccoli in the teeth.

"Many times at the end of the night I will find out there was a potential problem during the telecast, but since I wasn't aware of it, it was never an issue," said Fox, the Kings' analyst for the past 19 seasons, on the importance of the stage manager. "That's the sign of a great stage manager."

A rapport between the stage manager and broadcaster is as important as it is between the stage manager and game producer.

"The producer has to be comfortable I'm there to take care of what I'm supposed to do," said Moskal, wearing her own headset with an electronic switch box attached to her hip that controls talking back and forth to the truck.

Because she's devoting more time to her family and limiting her assignments, Moskal works part-time for Fox Sports West/Prime Ticket, doing less than the hundreds of assignments a year she once was committed to.

In a city as large as Los Angeles, many veteran stage managers in the company - Dean Benson, Boyd Robertson, Jill Shepherd or Barbara Donahue - can be assigned to 150 or more events a year and make it a full-time adventure. Robertson, for example, has become Vin Scully's right-hand man in the Dodgers' TV booth, among his other duties.

Shepherd understands the "mom" connection first-hand, with a 17-year-old son on her watch.

"I found out early that mothering skills work wonderfully with this job," said Shepherd, who lives in El Segundo and primarily does Clippers and Angels games these days for the network, for which she has been employed since 1985.

Shepherd's position down on the court for many of her basketball assignments makes her an asset for the broadcast. She might notice an injury occur away from the play, or a coach become animated by a referee's call and alert the producer or director in the truck about it.

"Whether we have five cameras or 17cameras, they can't see everything," Shepherd said.

A stage manager's role really wasn't anything Moskal or Shepherd knew much about when considering a job in sports TV years ago.

Moskal, after playing a year of softball at Oklahoma University, got her broadcasting degree from CSUN and considered on-camera sportscasting, admiring Jayne Kennedy and Gayle Gardner. Former Prime Ticket producer Pat McClenahan, now the president and general manager of KCBS and KCAL, guided her toward production assistant to learn the business quicker.

Shepherd was a law major at the University of Maryland who ended up getting a degree in TV and film from San Diego State. She got hooked watching how ESPN produced a hockey telecast in person on an invite from a friend.

Shepherd and Moskal have a full plate this weekend, doing the Pac-10 men's and women's basketball tournaments, respectively, for Fox Sports Net.

"Just think, on any given day, we don't know what'll unfold over the next two or three hours," Shepherd said. "There's so much human emotion and drama, that's one of the best parts of this job. You can see 1,000 games but you don't know how it's going to end."

Said Moskal: "I still think it's a dream job for anyone who's a sports fan."