The Weekend Windup 105.1by Anthony Rainey'17The typical American citizen welcomes a new year with a resolution not often followed past the first week. Despite an overwhelming disapproval of 2016, it is likely many Americans have already failed to follow through with the exciting plans of 2017.
Recently at Bedford High School, graduating seniors Matt Provost, Mitchell Roy, Jack Flanagan and Manny Ray began their own public radio podcast, The Weekend Windup. Back in early January this group of four seniors partnered with Harry Kozlowski, the head of the town radio station Bedford 105.1. Over three months into the new year and these high schoolers are looking to break the New Year curve and build roots for students interested in pursuing broadcast journalism in the future. BCTV has already been working with two other student media groups in Radio Unleashed and new to this school year, Bulldogs Radio. The Weekend Windup has begun to pick-up in popularity around the school as the main hub for Bedford sports. It is the most downloaded show on Bedford 105.1 and is still growing. Each week the four seniors alternate who hosts the podcast, but has mostly featured Matt Provost and Mitchell Roy in lead. They bring in guest speakers to interview that help bring new elements to the show, recent guests include; track athlete Thomas Norfleet, and Rice Owl biddy team members Connor Zendzian and Timmy Saltzman. A week prior to the release of Weekend Windup Episode #7, Matt Provost and Mitchell Roy gave some insight on how the radio podcast originated and what life at BCTV studios has been like for the four of them. Mitchell Roy says, ¨originally it was going to be a politics show, so Matt Provost, Jack Flanagan and I were all in the same Spanish class and we kind of goof-off a little bit and don’t pay as much attention as we should and during the election season we had some pretty heated debates, political debates¨. |
As for Manny, he got in on the podcast apart from school, he joined last minute before the first episode and has been apart of the group since.
Mitchell continues, ¨we decided we wanted to do a radio show. We have lots of interesting conversations where we are like, “Hey let's bring these to radio”. Although there was no intention of studying broadcast journalism in college for either Matt or Mitchell, the reason for creating their own podcast was purely for entertainment. Matt talked about the journalism class offered through the high school at one point and says, ¨I took journalism freshman year and it was a lot of fun. I remember we did record a radio show with one of my friends as like one of the projects for the class and I thought that was a lot of fun¨, continued, ¨I just feel at home when I do it¨. At times the show has not been the easiest to handle according to both Matt and Mitch, each week they encounter different struggles that they must overcome in order to get the show ready to air in time. Mitchell says, ¨we do everything from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm Thursdays then we tape the show from 4:30 pm to 7:00 pm. I guess with the prep it’s about two hours of recording than an hour. If it has a lot of editing it’ll be like an hour of editing but it's two hours recording, an hour editing and then an hour and a half prep. So that's four and a half hours¨. Taking that amount time out any schedule is not easy, especially for seniors. Matt discussed more of the challenges they face during the show, ¨the biggest challenge has been finding where “the line” is, where you can be kind of edgy and where you can kind of not be, a little bit¨, ¨Sometimes you cross that line and you have to edit it out and sometimes we go political and sometimes we go over some things that you can’t necessarily say but we figured that out¨. Despite this struggle, the Weekend Windup has been a fairly clean show and according to Mitchell, the podcast has attempted to emulate the work of another popular sports media, Barstool Sports. Barstool Sports is not the cleanest podcast, however, the Weekend Windup has been careful about what they say. Matt and Mitchell hope to continue their work in radio even after high school. Matt intends on attending Saint Anselm's, so he will be around to continue the podcast if he decides to. Mitchell hasn't decided where he will be going next year, but he says he wouldn't mind doing radio like the Weekend Windup in college. In closing, Matt adds, ¨I just want to let people know that we are going to keep going with it and it's definitely not anything that we are going to stop soon¨. Good job Bulldogs! |
photo credit: Jack Flanagan & Weekend Windup
If you are interested in hearing any of the Weekend Windup podcasts, the show airs at 9:00 am on Saturdays and 9:00 pm on Sundays on Bedford 105.1. Don't worry if you missed an episode, they are all online and downloadable from the Instagram bio (@WeekendWindup) and the Twitter bio (@weekend_windup).
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