Lassiter High School days and string

When searching through archives of Lassiter High School, I wasn’t surprised to find that the most articles were about senior Hutson Mason in his final season in high school. Mason had set several state records and was leading the high school to an undefeated regular season. I was a freshman at the time and can remember it vividly. It was our best football season in years and Mason gave the school life again. The article I found first was after Lassiter won its second round play off game 70-49 over South Gwinnett. In the next game of the playoffs, Lassiter fell to Colquitt County to end the undefeated season. Mason went on to play for UGA after sitting behind Aaron Murray.

I find the most effective way for myself to keep up with my facts, notes, and interviews is google docs. I saw a couple other people wrote this, too. I think it’s great that it can be accessed through any computer and that helps for when I pick up on a story while at the study center or on my laptop at home. Also it helps in group projects cause we can easily share things. It also helps when your computer used to be prone to crashing, the auto-save and backup of the google drive is a lifesaver on many accounts.

Schooldays/String

I chose to go way back with my school post, found here. This is an article about my high school, Starr’s Mill, getting ready to open in 1997. It’s a sweet piece for me, as I grew up going to school in the complex mention and gives me a little bit of history about where I spent 12 years of my life. I did not know there was a Starr’s Mill school in Fayette county long before ours opened, I thought the name of the school was based solely off the mill that was a mile down the road.

In regards to Clark’s writing, I probably need a better way of keeping track of my material for stories. Although I know we briefly discussed in class, there are some really great resources out there. My best method is a little bit of organized chaos, but it works for me. I have grown very fond of Google Drive, so I make a folder in Google Drive for each piece that I work on. I have a doc for story links, a doc for transcriptions, one for background facts and one for the actual story. I intend to use the same method for this class but hope I can weave in some new techniques as we learn them.

Through the Archives: Pickens High teacher accused of sexually assaulting student

I struggled to find stories about Pickens High School in the time frame suggested, so I went with this story from 2010 about a PHS science teacher who was accused of sexual assault.

It was a surreal time when I was in ninth grade and this happened. Laura Lyles taught several of my friends, so there were a lot of questions about if anything had occurred with them. One person who was rumored to be involved was my mother’s best friend’s son, so that was an interesting situation to see play out from afar.

It was a situation that certainly made it hard for everyone to keep their attention at the work in front of them. Some made crude jokes, some were scared of being accused and others didn’t pay it any mind. What’s strange now is that I had completely forgotten about it until this assignment. In fact, it took several minutes for me to remember the teacher’s name.

Sayre School

I looked long and hard for a news story that’s about my small private school in downtown Lexington, KY and it took me a while to find a story I wanted to post. Most of the things I found while searching we’re just score updates or school reviews. My school for as long as I can remember was pretty drama free in the sense of newsworthy-ness. I did find this story (although it’s from 2010, it’s the only thing I could find that fit into the description of a new story about my school).

I think this story is very interesting because I was a sophomore when this story happened and it was a pretty huge deal among our little community. Dylan Newton, a senior at the time, was our soccer teams best player. He was a really special player to watch and was almost like a magician on the field. During a game he fell and broke his leg really badly. He had to be taken off the field by an ambulance and couldn’t finish the rest of his senior year. It was a huge deal to our small school because with him on our team we were going to have a chance to go further in the state championship than we had done in previous years. This is a big deal for a small academic school that, at the time, didn’t even have athletic tryouts for most teams because we needed all the players we could get.

I remember visiting Dylan in the hospital and his leg injury was much more serious than just a break. He had a horrible infection in his leg and the doctors found a way to treat it: maggots. That’s what this story is about. Dylan still has his leg and it is functioning just as well today even though he did not get to go on and further his soccer career in college.

Easley High School archived story

Finding archived stories about my high school in Easley, South Carolina, was a bit difficult. There’s plenty of news from recent years, but once I searched for news from 2009 or prior, the selection was scarce. I did find this story about an Easley High School teacher who was charged with four counts of soliciting minors. Yes, it’s a very gloomy story. But it interested me because I had no clue. I was about to enter middle school at the time this story was written, so it seems reasonable to think that I would have heard about this, but I don’t remember anything. I like looking back and thinking about how I consumed news at different ages. I feel like around this time, I definitely wasn’t consuming online news regularly. However, my mom also said she doesn’t remember this, so it might have been extremely under-covered.

The story was published on GoUpstate.com in July of 2007. It reported that Curtis Ballard, who was a science teacher at Easley High School, was charged with soliciting sex through the Internet. He was caught by deputies posing as 13-year-old girls. He had been teaching at the school for over 20 years and taught biology, anatomy and physiology. I also noticed the lack of coverage on this incident from other local news publications, which surprised me.

High School Archives: Southwest DeKalb

About 99% of the archives I found about my high school Southwest DeKalb were about sports, mainly football. SWD has always been a worthy competitor in Georgia high school sports, so I was not surprised. The most interesting story I found was written by Shannon Owens of the Orlando Sentinel. The article titled “Black kicker a rare find,” was about written about Taylor Wesley, who at the time was Florida A&M’s starting kicker. Wesley is also an alumnus of Southwest DeKalb High School. He talks about growing up in an all black community and how there were black kickers in grade because someone had to take the position. He went on to mention the number of black kickers dwindle significantly once they move on to college, even at HBCUs.

The writer also interviewed SWD’s head football coach at the time, Colin Godfrey. Coach “Buck,” as we called him, was the first black kicker to emerge out of Southwest DeKalb and receive a full athletic scholarship for his position. Coach Buck thinks that many black students don’t go after the kicker position because people are more concerned with those who make touchdowns and throw passes.

School Days – Dacula High

The piece I’m looking at (for Dacula High School) is a feature from 2009 on the team’s star basketball player Brian Cole. I almost called Cole the team’s best player, but I was freshman at the time the article was written, I remember he was not the team’s best player.

After all, a piece on your team’s best player shouldn’t call him lazy in the first sentence:

DACULA – Brian Cole will admit it – he’s lazy.

The dude was like 6’9 version of Napoleon Dynamite, with a haircut. He also had a deadly hook shot, which his coach mentions, the helped his average a cool 19 points per game that year. I remember guarding him at practice watching him put it to work. The oaf would lumber down the block, seal with with arm, and toss the ball over his head. The hook wasn’t sexy, but money nonetheless. Have you ever even tried to shoot a hook shot before? It’s practically impossible to aim for everyone who’s not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

It’s funny the article mentions him dominating everyone until they caught up to him in height. He ended playing Division 1 for UNC-Greensboro, but couldn’t carve out a role. He never really developed a game outside of the hook shot because he was, well, lazy.

The Out-of-Door Academy

I spent my first two years of high school at a massive public school in Sarasota before transferring to a small private school for my junior and senior years. I chose to find an article on the latter and came across this little gem of a story. I was in fourth grade when this article was written, and my school did not yet have a football program. But the basketball team was well-known and my best friend’s big brother was a senior and ODA’s star player. Essentially, this story is about the fact that my small school did not have a regular point guard and instead relied on contributions from two talented seniors to take on that role. This team was exceptionally talented for such a small school and sent multiple players to all-conference teams.

I really enjoyed finding this story because I went to just about every home game during the 2004 season with my best friend and am still close with the players featured in the story. My friend’s brother, David, walked on at Vanderbilt the following year and is a real grown up now, but I sent him the link to this story to remind him of how awkward and shy he was in high school!

Schooldays: Johns Creek High School

The year 2009 was actually the first year of existence for my high school — I was the first full four-year graduating class. With this in mind, I went back and found the writeup on the football team’s first ever home game. At the time, we only had a JV team as the football program was still in its development stage. It’s crazy to think that that was seven years ago.

Johns Creek won the game, getting things with the program off to a great start. The program would actually go on to have a bit of a underdog under-the-radar next few seasons, and even made the playoffs by the time I graduated.

I didn’t remember until finding this article that Johns Creek faced off against another new school in Langston Hughes. Researching this was a fun bit of introspection and brought back some great memories, when football games on Friday nights were the best part of my week and the place I felt most at home.

Ranney School

I found a piece on my school back from when I was in 8th grade.

It was posted in the Monmouth Journal and the focus was on the fall drama of that year, “Nagasaki Dust.” I actually went to see it and remember it being very good.

One thing I didn’t realize, which the article revealed to me, is that the cast calls for 19 while the play I saw only had 10 in the whole cast. They were still able to pull off a really good show.

The director, Mr John Doyle, who I’ve known since I was eight or nine, is someone who is able to pull something like that off. I don’t know how he does it bit he’s able to scale down these bigger shows, if needed, and his message always comes across clearly.

The reason I chose this article is because I was having trouble with Newsbank and I couldn’t seem to find any sports releases. My high school was not the most gifted with athletics and tended to excel in the classroom more so.