Francis Legros ‘95 was looking for a hands-on education in television production, and he found it at Fitchburg State.
Born in Haiti, he moved to the U.S. in 1986, settling in New England. He got his first taste of audiovisual production during high school, and while serving in the Army National Guard, Legros was looking to take advantage of the college benefits he earned through his military service. “Which of the state schools had the best communications program? That was really the assessment,” he said.
One of his high school friends was already at Fitchburg State and recommended he give it a look.
“Fitchburg State had a good reputation, and I liked the hands-on part of the program,” Legros said. “It was professional from day one. When it came time to do an internship, I was ready to go.”
That internship was with WMUR Channel 9 in Manchester, N.H., an ABC affiliate station. That internship was the start of a remarkable career in television production spanning Comcast, FOX Sports Net, CNN and PBS before joining ESPN and The Walt Disney Company in 2005.
Legros is currently Vice President, Studio Production Operations, working out of ESPN’s sprawling Bristol, Conn. campus. His nearly 300-member team is responsible for orchestrating the behind the scenes technical happenings of ESPN’s studio shows in Connecticut, New York, Los Angeles, and Charlotte, N.C., including the flagship SportsCenter. “We provide the resources, the personnel and the facilities themselves to create those shows,” he said. “The sound and video quality, graphics insertion, virtual effects, camera control, content playback and recording, those are some of the actions of our best-in-class team.”
His previous Network Operations team’s work spanned 16 ESPN domestic and international networks, and Legros led backup and disaster recovery plans for ABC and the U.S.-based Disney cable networks.
At Fitchburg State, you learn about cameras, you learn about editing, lighting, video, writing. All the stuff we’re doing now, you learned the core of how to do it back then.
Legros traces the foundations of his career to lessons he learned at Fitchburg State, including an interactive communications class taught by Professor David Ryder. “That was one of the best academic and life classes, period,” Legros said. “We read books like ‘Getting to Yes’ and ‘Getting Past No.’ Those books have been instrumental to my career, to the point that whenever I’d tell someone about those books, I’d let them borrow them and they’d never get returned.”
Beyond the classroom, Legros ran track for the Falcons (and still follows its sports teams online), and worked for Residence Life in campus housing, further saving money while pursuing his degree. (It was also where he met his wife, to whom he will have been married 25 years next October.)
The technology of modern television technology has evolved greatly since his college days, as has the platform itself, which now extends to digital delivery and social media applications. But Legros said the foundational principles he learned at Fitchburg State remain applicable.
“At Fitchburg State, you learn about cameras, you learn about editing, lighting, video, writing. All the stuff we’re doing now, you learned the core of how to do it back then,” he said. “Maybe you’re doing it with more sophisticated tools, but the basics of how you do that stuff hasn’t changed that much.
“I started from a pretty solid base,” Legros continued. “In our classes, especially when you were in production, you were always in a team. I remember one professor saying we were already being positioned to hire one another someday, and my very first hire as a manager at Comcast happened to be a Fitchburg State grad. And that has continued throughout my career.”