Student Central
Editor: Makayla Wise
The students of MVHS spring into the new sport season
"Comeback season, when you get down you gotta come back.” - Curtis Myer
Spring has truly sprung here at Mt. Vernon. A new season of the year means a new season of sports. Now our track, baseball, tennis, and softball stars have their chance to shine! Some players are veterans of doing their designated sport, and others have just gotten started. There are definitely stories to be told.
Junior Ty Hazelton has been doing track for his entire high school career so far! He really enjoys being a part of the track and field team, Coach Ethan Trokey gives them unique exercises to do. There are several different events one can participate in, Hazelton does the high jump. The high jump is where one person will run for about 10 or 11 steps in a slight curve until they reach the side of the pole, then they will jump and arch their body over the pole, similar to doing a backflip over the pole. Hazelton hopes to someday beat the record height, which is six feet and six inches.
We know that no one is confined to just playing one sport or being in one club, and freshman Maya Nemiyer is here to prove it. Nemiyer has been a part of the girl’s softball team for five years, but she took a break from it this past year to explore other things such as girls basketball, volleyball, and even soccer. She has returned more ready than ever to take on this new season. It was thanks to her friends that she even joined all those years ago. They told her that it was fun and that they highly recommended it.
Having a team means having all different kinds of people with different views. In an interview with two different members of the team, junior Tyler Moore has been in tennis for his entire high school career so far and senior Malachi Hennum is getting to experience it from a newcomer’s perspective. Moore is one the hardest working members of the team. He said that when he first joined the team he thought it would be super easy, just hitting a ball back and forth, but it proved to be more difficult than he thought. He said each game is like a mental battle, and that it may take some time to be consistent in achieving victory. Meanwhile Hennum thinks the sport is actually easier compared to others that he has done, such as track and field. Hennum highly recommends both sports. The practices are different from one another but that’s what makes the sports different from one another. He enjoys tennis practice a lot. The team practices every school day between 2:15 and 4:30 pm. They practice at the tennis courts in the Spirit 76 park in town, but if the weather doesn’t cooperate, then they move their practices to the gym at the intermediate school.
Junior Sawyer Anderson is a member of the baseball team and he also has some things to share. He has been playing baseball since he was around 3 or 4 years old. He plays just about every place in the infield except for shortstop. He recommends baseball to other people and plans to do it after high school. He says that when you play baseball to be prepared to focus more on the things that you’re doing right than the things you mess up on.
This spring is filled with plenty of sport teams to watch and root for in their season. Let’s support these amazing teams as they go and play their best!
MVHS takes a look at stan culture
By Emily Horrell
Pop culture has come a long way from the early days of Hollywood and fame; today we have access to the most intimate parts of celebrity lives. In the late 90’s to early 2000’s, paparazzi was extremely invasive and often went too far in their endeavors to get “the money shot”, which was just a photo interesting enough to sell to the news or magazines.
Today, it's much of the same invasive paparazzi but with even more tactics as technology advances. Viewers get to see all of their embarrassing photo leaks and rather unflattering angles of them doing something weird (or even totally normal) in public. This closeness and access to celebrities can cause unwanted and often uncomfortable attention. Dictionary.com defines parasocial relationships as “a relationship that a person imagines having with another person whom they do not actually know, such as a celebrity or a fictional character.” It continues, “This often involves a person feeling as though they have a close, intimate connection with someone whom they have never met due to closely following that person (or character) in media, such as TV shows, videos, podcasts, etc.”
This view into celebrity lives can cause fans to feel like they really know these people, especially smaller influencers such as TikTok personalities and YouTube stars. These relationships are usually harmless, the most they usually lead to is adoration and sometimes weird social media posts. Occasionally, they can go further. Otegha Uwagba wrote a piece for The Guardian about her own experience with parasocial relationships, “After a period where rarely a day would go by without some form of contact – invitations for coffee, lunch, to her house (all politely declined) – I texted a friend asking for advice. The attention had become suffocating, but I also felt a little guilty.”
She continues, “She was pleasant enough, if somewhat intense. In the end, I chose the coward’s way out. I blocked her on social media and felt an immediate sense of relief as I did so. It probably wasn’t the kindest way of dealing with the situation, but I also reasoned that feeling anxious on account of a stranger’s expectations of friendship from me wasn’t what I’d signed up for as a writer.” She had this experience after she had followed a fan back on Twitter, a harmless act, but some are just too caught up with the idea that they actually know these idols and that can cause individuals to act out of character.
Of course being an average Harry Styles fan or enjoying Angelina Jolie movies doesn’t mean you have a parasocial relationship, but it's still a good idea to remember that celebrities are just people and they have their own lives outside of fame, they deserve privacy just like everyone else.
Alex Watts in the spotlight
By Jacob Witmer
When interviewed, Alex Watts talked about his high school experience. The main thing that he did differently than most students is, “I didn't follow what is typically thought of high school; I don't think grades define intelligence. I didn't force myself to do anything I didn't like.” He continues, “I was on my own time and I managed it very well. I may not have had all A’s, but I passed the same classes everybody else did.” Watts was most interested in classes that help with “personal development when you have to think about yourself and you're trying to learn more about you.”
Watts is a top athlete at our school and discusses his involvement saying, “Sports at this school can be an issue if you make it an issue like if you care about starting or being on varsity, you have to be good to play. There are some biases with coaches and the crowd; now there's going to be bias everywhere and if you complain about them it won't help anybody. It doesn't matter what you do, it won't change the coach's mind and it won't change the crowds' mind, but if you know you’re a good player, you’re a good player”
Courtesy to ozark sport zone
Watts in his senior year has matured throughout high school in many ways. He explains, “My freshman year I was kind of just giddy and stupid. I thought everything was kinda just gonna workout. Once I hit a certain maturity level I realized kind of the danger of not succeeding and things not working out.” He shares his advice: “If you want to go to college, you have to work for it. Even if you have good grades you have to apply effort into it, you have to ask for scholarships, good grades won't do that for you.”
Watts believes getting a job helped with his maturing, saying, “Getting a job made me realize what work actually is. School is there to facilitate and help, but it's not gonna get you where you want to be in life. Grades matter, but it's more what you do with the knowledge, can you apply it or are you just memorizing it to take a test? Also, as a teenager, it's kind of dumb to fret about breakups. I spent too much time on that”
Watts is very wise beyond his years, but during his years of high school, he has struggled. He says, “I got pretty burnt out of school sophomore year. I didn't want to do anything. I let my anxiety build and once I told myself I had anxiety and the doctors told me I had anxiety, it made it easier to not do work and kind of be a crappy person, you had an excuse to scapegoat it on to. But what helped me with that was telling myself I don't have anxiety, you get anxiety. I realized life is hard and once you put yourself into a stressful situation your body chemistry changes, you unlock different ways to think about things, you also become more adaptive.”
Watts believes, “School shouldn't be giving you anxiety; now I get it every morning because of school but if I think about it, it doesn't hurt you. The big thing is what you need to do and what you want to do. I [don’t] have to graduate with a 4.0 GPA but I need to graduate. And you need to be able to learn to go into the workforce.”
When asked what kind of work he wants to do, Watts responded with an answer that was quite surprising, “I don't know but at Schreibers, I can tell who dropped out and who got a GED. The ones who dropped out lacked basic learning skills. Like if you think about it in the 1920s if you had a leak or a problem with your house you couldn't just call and get someone to do it for you. Now they are teaching you to focus on one subject, like now you have to call people to work for you.”
He continues, “It’s just another way for the government to make money and I think that's what they want, they don't want us to be independent people. They saw the assembly line and saw they were able to make cars super fast with different people working on different things, so they were thinking let's have people get really good at one thing. Like at Schreibers, in all of our different machines [are] little parts made by different factories that only make that part it's almost like everything we have is monopolized.”
Watts' fitness journey was inspired by, “the buff Indians from the Pocahontas commercials or Zac Efron from the Baywatch movie.” He says, “It used to be I just wanted to look good, I mean every teenager wants to look good. As I got more educated about fitness and watched Youtube fitness influencers that were also kind of philosophers, it wasn't so much about looking good, it was about feeling good and doing good. I now want to increase my longevity.”
Alex Watts IG @alexander_eugene_watts
Watts has an interesting opinion, but a good point about school and work. He says, “I would say that my grades are not the best because I sit there and I think about it. Teachers think our job is to do school work and what they don't realize is I have a job. They think we are high schoolers. Our job isn't to get a job but to focus on school.” He gets personal: “That's okay to think about, but my mom can't afford for me to not get a job. I purchase most of my stuff and what better way is there to prepare me for my life than actually working? The school system tries recreating work by making 8 hour days getting us in that 9 to 5 mindset but hard work isn't like that, it’s 12 hour shifts working overnight. That made it easy for me to ignore school cause I felt like I was smart enough.”
Watts thinks that you go to school to learn at school. “I don't go to school so that they can send me home with schoolwork to practice on my own and maybe mess up. In the workforce, it doesn't matter if I graduate with an A or a D, what does matter is how well I cut my body up so when I'm fifty I can go to the gym for an hour and a half a day, that is good for me. I want to be able to move and be comfortable when I'm older. I don't see success as wealth and monetary value, I see it as how happy [I am], like I don't need a big house [in order] to play with my kids, or run around with my dogs still. I think fitness is a huge part of being in high school.” This is Alex Watts.