Founded in the midst of Covid, the livestreaming program at Liberty has gone through many different forms. With the advancements becoming noticeable and notable when reviewing past uploads, such as improvements in sound and video quality to an introduction of live broadcasters over the sports broadcasts.
The idea of doing livestream work over sports first got brought up by Cary Eldredge during the football season of 2020 when Covid restrictions kept crowds from attending games. There was a demand for those to watch the football games online since they couldn’t see it in person.
Publications teacher, Jonathan Hall, recruited the original team consisting of Jayce Haun (Class of 23), Rhett Cunningham (23), and Sruthi Ramesh (22).
This group worked with what limited material was on hand managed to publish the games via a single camera to the Publications’ Youtube account with Haun running the technical side of things. This system persisted until the end of the end of the restrictive attendance guidelines at the end of the 2021 sports season.
After the Covid restrictions started to become looser, the program was able to extend into other areas as well such as streaming the basketball and soccer games.
Roadblocks did start to become more prevalent when the district installed Hudl cameras in gyms and at stadiums. This allowed for athletic directors to control a game camera from their phone and broadcast straight to the activities youtube account. They became widespread causing the program to stagnate for a time. Although, in 2024 the program was able to be improved from past streams in video and sound quality.
“We ran into problems around 2023 but we really picked up last year and continued to improve this year and we are seeing an increase in interest from our newer journalists,” Hall said.
The program has formed another offshoot this year with the introduction of live sports commentators over the football and basketball streams. This shows the continued growth and adaptability of the program and assist their goals of continuing this progression.
In addition to sports, the program has hosted a school board candidate town hall each of the last five years.
One of the broadcasters, Mason Molitor (11), believes that the program has grown a lot.
“We definitely had really good growth this year and with continued work and effort I think we can achieve our goals of having the best broadcasting programs in the St. Louis area and having broadcasters over every game that is hosted at Liberty High School,” Molitor said.
