Since the 2020-2021 school year, a year which saw many of our students learning online due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of Harvey High School students have been keeping the community connected through its online streaming services.
The Harvey High Stream Team started broadcasting sporting events online from the high school to allow spectators to watch those events during pandemic restrictions. The broadcasts have since become a way to connect to community members who may not be able to attend the games.
“I’d say our main goal is to broadcast as many games as possible, because a lot of parents and grandparents don’t have the ability to go see the game, especially in winter when basketball season is super active,” said Grade 12 student Kevin Scheffers-Roy.
With support from Principal Jeremy MacIver, Teacher David White and school Athletic Director Mike Fletcher developed the initial Stream Team concept, enlisting Scheffers-Roy and fellow students Joe Gregory, Ashton Little, and German exchange student Tim Neidert to execute the plan. Gregory, Ashton, and Little have all since graduated.
“Tim arrived with a get-it-done mentality, showing us what we could accomplish if we made big plans and just went for them,” said Scheffers-Roy of Neidert’s involvement. “With the technical abilities of Tim and Ashton, we were able to improve our streams, allowing us to have multiple cameras, better audio, better quality graphics, an on-stream scoreboard, and many other key features of our streams now.”
From humble beginnings, the team has grown to about 12 students, with a core group of six. And though their primary focus is live streaming basketball games during the season, the team also streams other activities at the school and in the community.
Said Stream Team member Cecilia Pauley, a Grade 12 student, “We do volleyball as well as some school activities like graduation. The biggest thing I think we have done as a group is the wheelchair basketball gold medal finals.”
Thanks to relationships established between Harvey High and the University of New Brunswick, Stream Team members were asked last Spring to help the university broadcast its wheelchair basketball games. Stream Team members streamed all five preliminary games on the UNB YouTube channel, as well as the gold medal final.
“We had our kids working the cameras and some of our kids were shadowing the guys in the [broadcast] truck who were doing all the producing,” White said. “And [Kevin and Cecelia] were doing the commentary as well.”
“I’m colour and he’s play-by-play,” said Pauley of her and Scheffers-Roy’s roles in the broadcast booth. “That’s usually how it goes.”
Taking care of business
While the Stream Team’s stated goal is broadcasting to the Harvey community, its members do much more to keep the project going. One of the most important non-broadcast activities is fundraising via ad sales. “Seems like we always need to buy new stuff and that money has to come from somewhere,” said White.
The team meets to determine the yearly ad rate. Then, “local businesses can reach out and pay to have their logo on the stream and get mentioned in the video descriptions,” he said.
“We got tons of sponsors this year. One of our long-time sponsors is a local realtor, Scott Pierce, with RE/MAX East Coast ELITE Realty. He asked for an add and we offered a few different tiers of ad options, the highest of which was creating a 30-second ad. So we created an ad for him that we’ve been running all of this year.”
The team also produced a 60-second ad for Harvey’s ParticipACTION Activity Challenge.
And Scheffers-Roy does media-related photography for the Team, while also helping out his fellow students by creating highlight reels for players that request them.
Stream Team members clearly gain genuine professional broadcast experience. But using those skills in service to community is what drives them.
“[Harvey High] played a team that had just started last year, and their parents reached out and they were thankful about how kindly we spoke about their team during the broadcast,” Pauley said. “It was just really heartwarming to hear.”
Said Scheffers-Roy, “Certain teams love playing in our gym because they get to see we’re like a broadcasting school and they say, ‘we always watch the streams and it’s inspiring’. We really hope that other schools catch on so we’re going to try our best to pass on the knowledge that we’ve gained the past few years and, hopefully, [streaming high school sports] becomes a big thing in all of New Brunswick.”
A special mention
Joe was the first student to ask whether he could help Mike Fletcher and I with the streams, he was in Grade 9 at the time in 2020-2021. He streamed as much as he could for the next four years, when he wasn’t playing basketball and volleyball, mostly doing commentary, and has since graduated and helped coach the SR Boys Basketball team this season.
Teacher David White