To provide student athletes a platform to share their experiences, Athletic Director Dennis Stanton created the “All In” sports podcast. The podcast interviews members of high school’s Athletic Leadership Council (ALC) about their experiences in high school sports.
The club promotes conversation between athletes to share their experiences.
“The goal of the club is to provide a platform and a venue for student athletes to talk about their leadership strategies,” Stanton said.
Members of the ALC find value in conversations with other student athletes as they share their experiences in athletics.
“You hear a lot about the different sports,” senior Gina Smyth said. “I feel like I’ve definitely shared some things about running that most people wouldn’t know because you know, it’s not the most popular sport.”
By promoting discussion between athletes, the club has given students a chance to learn about new leadership strategies and implement them into their own sports and teams.
But the ALC Club meetings can only reach so many people. The next step for the club was to find a way to reach a wider audience so athletes can share their experiences on a greater scale.
“I hear so many great things that those student athletes are saying in those meetings so I thought, what’s a way that we can get this out to more people?” Stanton said. “The podcast was an easy transition to how do we get this out to more people.”
The three-week shut down was the perfect opportunity to record interviews and get the podcast up and running. Stanton said they “went nuts” and recorded 13 out of the 15 interviews during the shut down.
Many athletes discussed the importance of hard work and time management.
“You have to organize your time to make that time available for you to work hard,” junior Dekai Averett said.
The podcast also addresses the less prominent aspects of high school sports such as visualization and the mental side of sports.
“One thing that we really actually got into during the podcast was the visualizing aspect of performance and sports,” Smyth said.
According to Smyth, visualization is an overlooked aspect of athletics that can be beneficial for athletes.
“That is a part of athletics that a lot of people don’t think about but it’s something that you can really implement into your athletics that can really set you up mentally for a performance,” Smyth said.
Smyth said she specifically wanted to reach other female athletes through her podcast to address common stereotypes about women in athletics.
“Sometimes with being a female athlete, it’s not as popular or common to be super involved or passionate about your sport,” Smyth said. “But it’s ok to put in the work, to be present all the time and to try.”
Although it’s technically a “sports podcast”, the podcast touches on many different aspects of athletics that a wide variety of students can relate to, not necessarily just athletes.
“It’s not a sports podcast analyzing my performances,” Smyth said. “It’s more like different aspects and factors of athletics and being an athlete and a student and all those things.”
Stanton said that athletes have discussed issues such as the internal pressures they place on themselves. He said discussions like these are relevant outside athletics.
“Those kinds of things, I think, are applicable to different aspects of our life that are outside of sports,” Stanton said.
Athletes featured on the podcast say that it was a rewarding experience.
“I’d say that I did enjoy talking and kind of saying what I felt about certain things and my experiences,” Averett said.
The podcast has been an outlet for students to address certain topics related to sports and in life.
“It’s a good venue for them to express themselves and talk about things that might be vulnerable to them. Ways in which they might fail in leadership and ways in which they fail in athletics,” Stanton said.
According to Averett, there are benefits to playing an individual sport. Averett is involved in track and field and advised other athletes on the importance of off-season training.
“I wanted to talk to the student body at large, and athletes especially about the importance of training off-season,” Averett said.
Moving forward, Stanton said the club hopes to keep recording and publishing one episode a week.