Best Schools 2023: Anderson High School's Media Athletics Collaborative mixes visual arts with athletics

The east side of Cincinnati is home to Anderson High School, a comprehensive college preparatory high school with 17 years recognized as a top high school by US News & World Report under its belt. With Advanced Placement courses, Distributive Education Clubs of America, or DECA, Educators Rising and a variety of other programs, Anderson High School works to ensure there is a variety of programs and extracurricular options to interest all students.

But these programs aren't the only ones in which students can participate. Anderson High School also is home to the Media Athletics Collaborative (MAC), a first-of-its-kind program that collides the opposite worlds of visual and performing arts students with athletic programs. MAC is a student-driven extracurricular and class where student athletes are featured through the medium of graphics and videos that are written, shot and edited by visual and performing arts students in order to shed light on both individuals and teams within the community.

Grace Adams, a 2023 graduate of Anderson High School, is the founder and mastermind behind the Media Athletics Collaborative. She calls it having her "aha moment," after hitting a roadblock her sophomore year when she realized she wasn't meant to be a collegiate athlete, but knew she wanted to create a way for her to still connect with athletics.

"I loved my film class freshman year. It made me realize how much I enjoyed telling stories and creating images to accompany them," says Adams. "I wanted to combine this with my love for athletics, so I turned my idea into a proposal for a new extracurricular at my high school."

And so, Adams did just that. She approached her film teacher, Chad Weddle, in March 2020 and, through tireless work, they began their journey the next school year with just four other students.

"We started small and only took on what we could handle. We literally set up shop in an empty room in our district's administrative building," says Adams. "We brought in student-athletes and professionally photographed them, interviewed them and then created social media graphics."

And while the work was extremely detail-oriented and time-consuming, Adams says the payoff couldn't have been more worth it. "The athletes loved the recognition, and it satisfied my urge to create," says Adams. "Soon our Instagram followers skyrocketed. The result was extremely rewarding."

So, what does a typical day look like in the MAC studio? A typical photo shoot day only lasts about 30 minutes, but the research beforehand is much more extensive. The team researches what college teams are doing for their graphics, what's working for them and how they can do something similar to make things as professional as possible. They sit down and discuss who they want to highlight, why and how. "Our main goal of 2022 was to highlight every single sport," says Adams.

From there, they coordinate film days to film hype videos, or have athletes coming to the studio for interviews. After they started receiving recognition, the team decided to take on a much more time-extensive project: a documentary to highlight Aidan Orth, a then senior at Anderson High School and one of the best shot and discus throwers in the state. MAC felt she deserved to be recognized alongside all other Anderson High School athletes.

"They brought me in for a photo shoot and created a documentary of my story," says Orth, who is now throwing shot and discus at the collegiate level at Wittenberg University.

"I wrote the script, filmed and edited the story, and it was nominated for an Ohio Valley Emmy," says Adams. "Out of the 10 submissions in our school, five were accepted and only one of them won the award. This was huge for us."

While MAC has a massive impact on the arts and athletics, it also has an impact on students just in passing in the hallways. Abigail Riley, the parent of two students at Anderson High School, points to the impact it has had on the student body.

"My son is friends with a few people in MAC and, honestly, was never super into athletics," says Riley, "But since MAC started, he'll go to the games and tell me, 'Mom, check this out, my friend made this,' and I just think it's having more of an impact than they realize."

MAC has only grown and has no plans of stopping. With its social media surpassing 500 followers and amassing a team of over 15 members, it's not only impacting arts and athletics, but the student body and community as a whole.

"Our student body and staff are incredibly talented and hardworking, and the MAC program is an opportunity to bring that to an apex," says Kyle Fender, principal of Anderson High School. "Students working together, highlighting each other's successes, and providing real world experience in a growing field, that's what authentic learning is all about."

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