Chaminade vs. St. Anthony's Production Memo by Richard Adragna

As someone with a strong passion for sports, I wanted to stick with it for this class project. Initially, I wanted it to revolve around border wars between a given Nassau high school and a given Suffolk high school. I had contacted Daily News writer Chris Vaccaro, who is a guru in this certain field. When he got back to me with a list of significant rivalries in Long Island high school sports, the very first rivalry at the top of the list was the Chaminade Flyers (located in Mineola) against the St. Anthony’s Friars (situated in South Huntington), both parochial schools. Immediately, it was something I wanted to look at, given its prominence.

The idea of seeing a Chaminade-St. Anthony’s game, especially in boys’ lacrosse, came when I felt that to understand this contest, there should be more than just interviews with coaches and athletic directors. Watching a game in person adds more to what I was planning to do. Sure enough, April 3^rd was the day when the forces collided in Mineola. Pictures and video feeds were abundant, and I got an interview with Bill Basel, Chaminade’s head football coach, prior to it as well. The game, of course, did not disappoint. A few days later, I scored exclusives with St. Anthony’s athletic director Don Buckley, football coach Rich Reichert, and lacrosse coach Keith Wieczorek. All of the gentlemen gave me some great responses.

The sites I found for my project were very helpful with what I wanted to know about Chaminade vs. St. Anthony’s, along with the responses from Mr. Vaccaro to my questions. Judging by his responses, as well as those from the men I sat down with, the games between the schools are always hard-fought and both schools have tremendous amounts of respect for each other.

There were a couple things that were difficult for me in undertaking the project. One of which was trying to score interviews with all of the people I wanted to talk to. As soon as I returned from my Spring Break, both schools started theirs for the Easter holiday. As a result, the schools were closed and I couldn’t get what I wanted. I had to wait for the following week to make contact with all but Mr. Basel, whom I contacted before on his home phone number given to me by Mr. Vaccaro. I wanted some thoughts from Chaminade lacrosse coach Jack Moran and athletic director Don Scarola, leaving them messages. However, with time winding down, I was not able to hear from them and had no choice but to proceed with the production sans their take on the rivalry.

Secondly, trying to fit everything that I learned about the rivalry in two minutes was a really hard task. There was so much that I learned about it and the schools themselves that putting them in a short amount of time sounded very daunting. Then again, I didn’t have to. Not when I could put the generalities about the topic in the video and write about the facts in a few paragraphs.

I learned a great amount from this experience about the broadcasting and online aspects of journalism. As a print journalism major, I hope that such an experience would enable me to add to my repertoire of skills in the journalism field instead of sticking to just one aspect of it.