Christine Stricker is the lead of PCH Publications here at Parkway Central. She talks about the need of having a big social media presence for our school.
“I felt that social media was an opportunity to really build community which we are really in need of after the pandemic,” Stricker said. “By showing the great things that students are doing, by showing great photography and videography, we could really make the school a stronger community. I love to showcase student work.”
An account that you may see associated a lot with Parkway Central is ‘Colts Center’. We get to know how they got it started.
“At Parkway Central, there is a class called ‘Sports Marketing Internship’ and it was primarily only used for videoboard,” senior Jacob Padratzik said. “But last year, me and Leo (Brown) had Multimedia together and we were like, ‘Next year, let’s create an Instagram account for Sports Marketing class and we can post about upcoming games, news, events, and celebrations that happen at our school for more publicity.’”
The process may seem time consuming but it’s not as hard as you think.
“We usually just, in class, look up what are the upcoming games,” Padratzik said. “We have a schedule that happens and we usually only post for home games. We pick a player that we haven’t used in the past, we use a picture from PCH Publications and we crop them out of their background. Then, we look up canva templates or we make our own templates and we just make an edit with the day, who we play, the time, and the person. Usually it says ‘Game Day’ as the big bolded word.”
The future of Colts Center is up to the students.
“I hope that Colts Center continues,” teacher Julie Weindel said. “It really depends on the students that are in the class and what they want to do with that. So this year, our students that are taking the lead on it have really done a great job and they are really excited about doing the game day edits and different series that we are doing. Hopefully, we continue and just continue everything that we’ve done this year in the next year and that we add on some things, so we are just really excited. It’s a new part of our internship class. We think it’s been a lot of fun and it’s been going great.”
“If you are interested in Colts Center, you definitely can reach out to Ms. Weindel or even Ms. Hale,” Padratzik said. “You can be interested in many ways; You can be interested in the videoboard, the Instragam part of it, or just being in the good environment in the class where it’s peaceful and you can get other work done as well as marketing in Parkway Central sports.”
Colts Center plans to continue this success. Make sure you follow them on Instagram @Colts_Center.
