By: Sierra Hutmacher
March 6th
Over the last ten years at Hamilton High School, Covering Hawkeye Sports has come a long way. People know that this is the place to go when they need scores, dates, or other information. But on any given day, you can find out what happens behind the scenes in the CHS class.
Class begins at 9:35, with announcements. Mr. Behnke regularly spends the next 20 minutes discussing who needs to upload and create game day graphics, final scores, and other types of coverage. The information for each group is displayed on the board, and as soon as he finishes speaking, everyone stands up and goes to their groups. On Fridays, we turn in our weekly logs, which is an outline of everything we did during the week, as well as our monthly calendars, which are very similar. All groups plan what they will do each day of the week, whether it is making game days on Mondays or interviewing, etc.
Group members send out emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays getting permission to interview people to get people more involved on our social media, and get to know the players, and members in each group take time out of their day outside of school to take pictures and videos at events for graphics and reels.
Reece Carlson is someone a lot of people rely on in Covering Hawkeye Sports. He isn’t really in a group because he does many different things.
“I help out with anyone who needs help with writing, technology, or the website,” he said. “I also help out with special projects like the mood meter, also from the last trimester I had done the start bench cut reel.”
Students in this class use a variety of skills including collaboration, technology literacy, and communication to work together and succeed. Each group decides when they can take pictures. This is only the first part. There are articles to write like game capsules, which explain what happened at the sports event, but there are also gamedays, final scores, that tell you when and where the sporting event is, the event scores, and other graphics, such as state cuts. Every template created must be edited each time, with different pictures, using different sites, a skill that must be practiced. Not something you just “know.” Things are posted and created daily.
I talked to a few people from different groups to see what their main focus was during the hour.
Tim Davis stated, “I focus on making sure everyone has what they need, including stats, ranking, and everything else.”
A person in the social media group – Luke Hernandez said, “My main focus is to have all teachers be emailed so we can make sure students can be pulled out of class for interviews and reels.”
CHS isn’t as easy as you think, it takes skill and motivation to keep up with everything that goes on. A lot of people think they know how it works and think it’s just an easy post on Instagram, but it’s much more than that and no one has been able to create that same success.