Friday night lights aren’t just for the football players. For seniors and sports journalists Chris Lauck and Matt Hicks, the roar of the crowd and the throwing of a football are the two main things that this duo lives on.
You’ve probably seen them up at the football field press box; headsets on, rosters in hand, ready to take on the weekly Friday night football games. Lauck and Hicks are the new faces of sports journalism.
As a new school year approached, new roles had to be filled. Last year, Jack Petrucci served as Hawk Headlines’ sports broadcast commentator. Petrucci, who was a Senior at Kaynor Tech at the time, heard about the department through a journalist here at Woodland and willingly volunteered to be apart of the sports department for Hawk Headlines. He was able to commentate football and basketball games last year, making sports broadcasts a big hit. Sadly, Petrucci graduated from Kaynor and could no longer be apart of the department. Coming into the new school year this August, Lauck was in the journalism class when advisor James Amato, asked if he would be interested in taking over the role of sports commentator. Lauck was thrilled to have been offered this position considering his love for sports and did not pass it up. A few weeks later, Senior, Matt Hicks came into the journalism class, due to Lauck informing him of the job and becoming interested in it as well.
Lauck and Hicks were able to start their commentating career with one of the high school’s most popular sport, football. For both boys, commentating football was the least bit difficult to them, as they are both diehard Patriots fans. Every Friday night they would put on their headsets and start commentating the games, making it look a lot easier said than done. Although commentating was easy, you can’t commentate unless all your technical equipment works. Throughout the season there were many technical difficulties that conflicted with the broadcasts.
“We’ve been through about every problem, but we got better every broadcast and have learned a lot,” Lauck said.
With winter sports in full swing, the boys will begin commentating boys and girls basketball.
“We will start using multicam for the games,” says Hicks.
“Multicam is an app where you can have multiple cameras in different areas during live broadcasts. There will be one under the hoop, near the home bench and one near Matt and I,” Lauck reveals.
Not only are Lauck and Hicks commentating sports, they are also creating weekly sports podcasts, which just happen to be their senior projects. The podcasts include “the whole 9 yards” as Lauck likes to put it. These podcasts cover Woodland sports, MLB, UConn basketball, fantasy football, and the NBA. In the beginning, the podcasts started off as audio only, but as the boys progressed and became more familiarized with how they wanted to run them, it turned into an actual sports talk show.
The sports duo will continue commentating for basketball this season and baseball during the spring.
“Working with Chris is fun and we learn a lot from each other,” describes Hicks.
For anyone who wants to take over their role next year, it’s a job where you will have to overcome challenges and think of ideas to make things work. However, this year’s staff highly encourages involvement in the department and highlights its benefits.
Hicks says “It’s a lot of work but it’s very rewarding in the end.”
