Brian Libeer Films and Edits Hype Videos for the Football Team

Libeer can be found in the back of the room staring blankly at the speckled gray and black floor during the three minute video that took him the entire game to film and around two hours to edit. Immediately after the video ends he looks around avoiding eye contact to make himself look busy.

“It’s not about me, it’s about the kids,” Libeer said.

He makes one highlights video and one motivational video weekly to share with the football team, coaches and his 522 followers on Twitter.

Libeer started making the action-packed motivational videos in 2010 when his oldest son Jake was on the sophomore football team. He made the videos for fun, and to share with the parents of the team. The next year his son made varsity and the father of another team member asked him to make the varsity team’s videos. The original goal was for Libeer to make an end-of-season football banquet video, but he ended up filming every football game, and turning each week’s footage into a video.

His sons Jake and Joe graduated and former football coach Chip Sherman left, but Libeer can still be found crouching down on the sidelines with a camera every football game. He was nervous that current varsity football Coach Dustin Delaney wouldn’t embrace the idea like coaches had in years past or that he wouldn’t have the same upclose on the field and in the locker room access to the players.

“He totally embraced the idea and let me do whatever I wanted to do,” Libeer said. “Then it’s just kind of become a thing where they ask me every year to do it.”
Now, four years since he had a son on the football team, Libeer still shows up early to every game, camera in hand. He creates two videos for the team every week. With every new video Libeer reaches twitter fame in the East community.

Although he occasionally gets stuck thinking of a new theme for each video and feels like he has already used up all of his ideas, Libeer always looks forward to sitting down at his computer and meshing together the videos that are viewed by everyone from grandparents of players to middle school boys who dream of the day that they will get to lace up their cleats and play football with the Lancers.

“There are sitcoms that have run for 15 years and they have new ideas all the time so I can come up with new ideas,” Libeer said. “It’s fun to challenge myself to come up with a new idea, and sometimes it’s a swing and miss, but sometimes you hit a homerun.”

Libeer keeps a notes folder in his phone with ideas for videos and after printing it out he realized his accumulation of ideas totaled out to be six pages long. He has been keeping track of them since he started making the videos so some of the ideas written down don’t even make sense to him anymore.

The brainstorming for his newest videos starts right after the game on the ride from the stadium to his house in Prairie Village. He tries to think of a song that captures the mood that best fits the last game.

“It may be just me that gets it,” Libeer said. “An inside reference for me that no one else would really know.”

He then uploads all the videos, plugs the song into the timeline and starts to piece the highlights of the games together from beginning to end. Coach Delaney provides Libeer with a word or two that he wants to convey at the next team meeting and from there he has free range to create the videos.

“Throughout the week and after the game he stays up late working on them,” his son, Sophomore TJ Libeer, says. “We are like his critics or guinea pigs.”

It takes Libeer an average of two hours to edit the three minute videos. His favorites are put together much quicker but if he isn’t feeling inspired by a video it can take him up to four hours to finish.

“My favorite videos just click together like I’m putting a puzzle together and I know where everything goes,” Libeer said.

Although Libeer wishes he could be invisible when the team watches his videos but the football boys, craving another win, live for seeing their highlights and the motivational messages that goes with them.

“It’s pretty cool that we are the first ones who get to see them each week before our next opponent,” senior football player Jack Workman said. “it’s a motivator that we will watch throughout the next 24 hours before the game.”