Puppy Bowl ref Dan Schachner on job, fostering and more

Puppy Bowl referee Dan Schachner has a pretty great gig.

Puppy Bowl referee Dan Schachner has a pretty great job – he not only presides over the greatness of tiny football dogs each year, he also helps with various fundraising efforts for local shelters in the NYC area and beyond thorughout the rest of the year.

Last week he did a phone interview with Dog O’Day about how he got the job as Puppy Bowl referee, how the game comes together, his own sports fandom, the importance of mental health (both human and canine) and more.

This year’s edition of the Puppy Bowl will air on Animal Planet and Discovery Plus on Sunday, February 7 at 2 p.m. ET. For more information about the dogs and the contest, see their website for more details.

Dog O’Day – How did you get involved with the Puppy Bowl? Dan Schachner –  Well, it’s my 10th year, so ten years ago Animal Planet knew me as a TV host, I had hosted some events for them and for some other networks before, mostly sports shows and things of that nature. They needed someone to be a referee for the Puppy Bowl, which at that point they had had a referee, but not someone who was as involved as a spokesperson. I made a really interesting audition video where I kind of went out and interviewed random people at New York City dog parks, edited it together to let them know that I should be their guy. You know, it’s not – there’s no mold for this job, there’s no job description that exists to the extent that we’ve done it, no one else has really done that before. So it was definitely something new, and I’m definitely psyched to be able to say that they’ve stuck with me for ten years. It’s been an honor.

That’s awesome. And on Instagram, you’re very involved throughout the year with fundraising for shelters and things like that.

In the offseason, as I like to call it – which is shorter and shorter every year, of course we air this year on February 7 and then we have a few months off before we pick it up again for the next Puppy Bowl, but in between I host a series of virtual trivia nights, fundraisers, live events, for Puppy Bowl itself I’ll be hosting a live viewing party that you can watch alongside the real Puppy Bowl, we’ll have some surprise guests. It’s a lot of fun to be able to extend out into the dog community and do different things that are unrelated to Puppy Bowl but still match the spirit. The [wider] dog community is so great. It’s a tremendous world out there.

What were some of the differences in filming this year because of the pandemic?

For the Puppy Bowl itself, we had to spread out, obviously – for the previous 16 years, it’s been shot in a relatively small Manhattan studio, which is where a lot of shows in New York are shot. Obviously, given the fact that we have over a hundred dogs every year, and over a hundred human crew and volunteers, that wasn’t really going to be either possible or safe in our normal, conventional space. So we really had to expand our reach and we found a hockey arena in upstate New York that was not being used, so we rented it out for a week and moved in! As you can imagine, being in an arena setting gave us a tremendous amount of space for the animals, for the crew, for the cameras.

The show itself is going to look and feel bigger to anyone who’s used to what the Puppy Bowl generally looks like. We’re usually working in a small space, and usually all we need is a small space – the field itself is maybe 25 feet long and 12 feet wide. So we needed much more space with that for social distancing, With that being a need this year, getting into a bigger space allowed the dogs to have a bit more breathing room, so to speak, has been great. Honestly, you’re going to see it in the show, because all that extra space really allowed the dogs to focus. So when they got onto the field they really got into it right away.