PEN Students Help Get The Word Out On Panthers Sports
• Student run series “Mic’d Up” gets Peninsula High community excited about Panthers sports.
As students fill the halls once again, Peninsula High School is regaining its sense of community. Much of this is due to students working behind the scenes to keep up school spirit, primarily the Associated Student Body (ASB).
One role within ASB, the commissioner of athletics position, has gone above and beyond to increase the excitement around sports on campus and bring attention to the games that were never played last year due to the coronavirus.
Senior Gianna Rosato is the Commissioner of Girls’ Athletics, and senior Jaiden Thakor is the Commissioner of Boys’ Athletics.
Together, Rosato and Thakor work with all the sports teams at Peninsula to ensure the programs are running smoothly. As they both play sports that are often less publicized, Rosato on the girls varsity soccer team and girls varsity volleyball team and Thakor on the boys varsity water polo team, they were driven to run for these leadership positions to ensure all sports were given the attention they deserve.
“The Commissioner of Athletics position appealed to me because I play sports that are less attended to, so I wanted to represent my sports as well as other sports in similar positions,” Rosato said.
“My big push for this year was inclusivity, so we work with every sport, mainly communicating about achievements and ideas we have for them. We wanted to make sure each sport has a chance to shine.”
Though the official titles for the two specify that Rosato’s focus is on girls’ athletics and Thakor’s focus is on boys’ athletics, often all sports are intertwined. Thus, the two collaborate often, working as a singular unit.
“We collaborate on basically everything,” Thakor said. “Since our new program ‘Mic’d Up’ is open to all sports and we still play on our own teams as well, there are times where I film girls games and Gianna films boys games, but the majority of the planning and work is done together.”
“Mic’d Up” is Peninsula’s new video series, published on Instagram on the account @pvphs.athletics. In these videos, a small microphone is attached to a player during their match, and this audio is overlaid on footage of the game, edited together and posted online. With the cooperation of the players and supportive comments from students, this series has helped to engage students’ interest in Peninsula athletics.
“Since the microphone is on for almost the entire game, Jaiden and I truly get to see people’s personalities and humor,” Rosato said. “All of the athletes we have communicated with have been super awesome and game to do anything, which has allowed us to make this series come to life. The student body has reacted super well, personally contacting us about how much they liked it, which makes me motivated and excited for this series’s future.”
So far, “Mic’d Up” has two episodes, the first highlighting Rosato’s own volleyball match and the second featuring varsity football player and junior Mason Gonzalez during the game against Santa Monica High School.
Rosato and Thakor plan to continue this series throughout the year in order to highlight sports during all playing seasons, and its current popularity among Peninsula students is a positive indication of this series’ lasting success.
Still, it is difficult to plan which games should be highlighted for the most entertaining audio footage, and there are bound to be challenges as this idea is still so new.
“Our main challenge is scheduling,” Rosato said. “We want to highlight our athletes in the best way possible, meaning we need to pick good games to mic them up. Sometimes, though, that does not work with our schedules, and we need to adjust and be flexible.”
Through “Mic’d Up”, Rosato and Thakor hope they can further create excitement around Peninsula athletics, highlighting the players in a way never been done before. As the first quarter of the school year just came to a close, there is plenty of time to further develop the video series, and the two are hopeful about the rest of the year.
“We hope to continue to promote every sport and keep ‘Mic’d Up’ consistent,” Thakor said. “Our main goal is to get the rest of the student body as hyped about our athletics department as we are.”
