Athens Academy Provides Webcasting Experience for Students

The NFHS Network is the leader in streaming live and on-demand high school sports. And Athens Academy in Athens, Georgia has been taking full advantage of the Georgia High School Association’s (GHSA) partnership with the NFHS Network to give its students a hands-on experience in webcasting production.

The school’s program originally started back in the late 1990s, when Mike Callinan, robotics teacher and the video production coordinator at Athens Academy, took a class on computing and began to share that knowledge with his students.

“After that, I started teaching students how to program routers by installing cat five cat six cables with RJ 45 plugs, you know, the whole nine yards. One of the first years for the end-of-class project, we installed a cat five cat six network in our football press box because the school had installed fiber network run to the press box,” Callinan said.

One of the parents of a student at Athens Academy at the time was in charge of the New Media Institute in the journalism school at the University of Georgia. The university couldn’t do anything with its athletic programs at the time, so Callinan invited them to do it at Athens Academy due to the work he and his class put in.

The University of Georgia sent a graduate student to Athens Academy with all the equipment they would need to start webcasting, including cameras, microphones and tripods. The university supplied the equipment while Callinan and his students supplied the talent. Callinan had about nine students who were interested in webcasting in the beginning.

The first livestream the school did became what is believed to be the first student-led webcast in the country, and it was a great success.

“We were rated No. 1 in the state in Class A football at the time, and we were playing this big major school out of Atlanta,” Callinan said. “So, they put it on the front page of our local paper, and they put in a lot of publicity for it – just to try to get an audience to watch this webcast and see what people thought. The number of people who tuned in to watch it overwhelmed the server a little bit.”

During the next school year, Athens Academy began to do webcasts without the help of the University of Georgia, mainly due to students in Callinan’s computer science classes making their own server and having plenty of experience from the previous year. However, once the NFHS Network started in 2013, the GHSA announced that the NFHS Network would be where the GHSA sports would be livestreamed.

This was no problem for Callinan and his student production team, however, as the school continues to run its student broadcast through the NFHS Network. The school still tries to make it a fullscale production with sponsors, commercial breaks, and plenty of research that goes into each game.

A couple of years ago, students wanted to make it feel more professional, specifically in baseball. Two students helped create a pan, tilt, zoom camera that gives the fans watching the broadcast the same view as someone watching an Atlanta Braves game. They put the work in, did the research, and figured out how to make it work. For Athens Academy, the student innovation is something they look forward to.

“I do think there’s still a limited number that are doing student- led webcasting where the kids are responsible for everything. And that’s something that we take pride in,” said Kevin Petroski, Athens Academy athletic director.

The school streams a variety of sports including football, baseball, basketball, volleyball, tennis and soccer. Athens Academy also streams away football games, as well as junior varsity competitions. The program filters down even farther into the middle school, where they try to expose young students to some of the experiences the high school students receive.

“Just about all our eighth-graders, select and take this media production class in high school – we call it advanced media production,” Callinan said. “So, they may have had a little bit of experience with using non-linear editing tools like Adobe Premiere Pro. They also are the ones to do the webcasts.”

Although Callinan has scaled back his workload as he nears retirement, his focus is still on making this experience the best it possibly can be for his students.

“The classroom experience, hands-on education and problem- based learning that the kids go through, that’s what makes this worthwhile,” Callinan said.