Bringing the Game to your Couch 

By: Chloe Day & Caitlyn Thole

With the pandemic still present and sports starting back up at the beginning of 2021, regulations on fans being able to watch athletes were put into place. It seemed that every school decided to live stream their sporting events so communities could watch the athletes play. Wondering how to make it possible for Princeville Jr/Sr High School, the tech department started researching 2 weeks before the first basketball game. 

After a lot of trial and error, it came to life. Using YouTube live as a platform, we are able to give our community and visiting communities the opportunity to watch the sporting events for free. Ultimately, we figured out all the issues and how to troubleshoot them while streaming live. 

For the first couple of games, we were using two iPads. One for the actual game and the other for the scoreboard. The quality of the iPads wasn’t ideal, making the picture blurry and hard to see which player was which. Thankfully, we had an anonymous donor contribute high-tech equipment to make our stream look more sharp. These donors donated money so that we could purchase two brand new cameras and the tripods to go with them. Two of everything was purchased so that both the junior high and high school competitions would have a great quality stream. We want to recognize and show great gratitude to the anonymous donor. Without their generosity, our streams wouldn’t have done the sporting events justice!

Another thanks to Jeff Kratzer for making the live steam tables for both the junior high and high school gyms! We appreciate everything you have done to make the process more smooth!

We would also like to thank Lindsey Day, Audrey Bowermaster, Nadine Daugherty, and Alex Delwiche for stepping up when we needed more help streaming games when we were competing at an away game. 

A shout out to Chris Delbridge and Tim Crear who did a phenomenal job doing play-by-play at all the varsity boys’ basketball games. We also want to acknowledge Brinlee Bauman who provided commentary for both the girls’ jv and varsity games. We have received a lot of feedback from viewers expressing their appreciation for the play-by-play, and how much it has helped to follow the game. It made viewers feel like they were at the game in the stands cheering on the players!

All in all, this couldn’t have been possible without our Tech Coordinator, Kelly Jenkins, Tech Aide, Rachel Bowermaster, and Principal Rich Thole.

We hope you make time to watch some of the streamed sporting events on our Youtube channels, Princeville High School Athletics and Princeville Jr High Athletics.