The dedicated work of the students involved has made Southeastern Sports Network successful in providing coverage of athletics at Hamilton Southeastern. (Photo provided)
By QUINN MATTHEWS
Teams aren’t just built on plays, practices, or wins and losses. They are about the players who wear the jersey. Behind every team statistic, there’s a deeper story. Hamilton Southeastern High School understands that it’s the shared culture that makes a true team, and their media programming is here to capture it.
HSE offers many media programs including Yearbook, Newspaper, News Broadcast, Sports Broadcast, General Public Relations, Sports Media, and Film Studio. There are hundreds of students in these programs, but one in particular was recently flooded with interested students. The sports media program, known as Southeastern Sports Network, includes 70 students that initially started as a Public Relations class.
“Public Relations started in 2023 with only 12 students,” said Carson Trotter, a fall executive director of sports media and a student at HSE. “It was a combined class of spring athletics teams and some out-of-building and in-building PR work like graphics for teacher parent night and other events. Suddenly, we had like 70 students wanting to join for sports PR, so we had to separate them. Now we have General Public Relations and Sports Media.”
The Southeastern Sports Network is split into teams to guarantee equal and thorough coverage. Each sport has a coverage team of students that range from five to eight people. The teams help manage the Instagram account for their assigned sport, along with gathering pictures and bonding with players. They cover every home game and post scores at halftime and after games throughout the entire season. Their main Instagram that houses all current sports is @southeasternsn. It has over 5,000 followers, and is packed with content all year round.
“A staple of our program is live event coverage. Timely photo coverage is the biggest thing you see. An expectation we are set to have is to attend every home event. If a student is not able to go to a home game, they should have a lot of trust in the Southeastern Sports Network to see scores,” said Omar Elsayed, the winter executive director of sports media, social media manager, creative professional, and student at HSE.
Along with updated sports coverage that you can always rely on, the Sports Media and Sports Broadcast classes are collaborating to create a series of episodes every week to document the 2025 football season. These episodes include footage of practices, games, pep talks from the coach, and many other unique elements that make the teams more personable.
“I’m really glad we started with a bang this year. The whole point of it [the football series] is to wrap in all kinds of media and types of storytelling,” said Elsayed. “A lot of people liked it a lot. People thought it was unique and different. We are setting the bar high and dropping new things that other schools aren’t doing, and that’s what is making us stand out.”
Even with 70 students in their program that all shine when it comes to providing top-of-the-line content, making the program feel like a family is their number one priority. Promoting shared culture to their staff is extremely important to them.
“I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of it. We preach every day, people over process, people over product. I want to make sure that the person to the right and to the left of me are okay before anything else,” said Trotter. “When we walk into our classroom there’s printed photos plastered all over the wall of our teams together covering games, out to eat after events, and getting together outside of the classroom, it’s a big culture that we really believe in.”
