Like many college students when they first arrive on campus, Matt Collier wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to do in life when he came to Wingate 20 years ago.
“I changed my mind several times,” he says. “When I was in high school I thought I wanted to be a chef, then an architect. Then I wanted to be an athletic trainer.” But when he didn’t do so well in biology courses, Collier reconsidered that path and set his sights on becoming an English teacher.
“I thought, ‘I can still be around sports and coach. I like to write. I like poetry,’” he explains. “I didn’t really like high school growing up, so I thought, ‘This is a way to kind of make it better every day of my life.’”
For the past 14 years, he has carried out his goal of improving the high-school experience for students at nearby Forest Hills. Collier was named Coach of the Year after leading the Yellow Jackets’ boys soccer team (18-6) to its first Rocky River Conference title last fall. And over the past year and a half, he has resurrected the school’s journalism program.
Although perhaps not as intense as soccer, getting his journalism class up and running last spring was an athletic feat of sorts. The course began as a last-minute replacement for a canceled leadership class.
With less than a week to prepare, Collier took a dozen students who had not signed up for journalism and helped them design and write articles for an online version of The Stinger, the school newspaper that had not published in more than a decade. Fewer than half of Union County’s public high schools have any sort of newspaper, and only a third offer a journalism class.
Going beyond the print confines of its namesake, the online Stinger has reached Forest Hills alumni across the United States and overseas. Collier says it’s a good way for those connected with the school to keep up with what’s happening and also to reminisce a bit with archived stories from years ago that are occasionally retyped and uploaded in a “Blast from the Past” feature.
This semester he has 18 students who applied to take journalism. The group is posting new articles to The Stinger’s Google Site and plans to explore different techniques of storytelling, such as podcasts and video production.
Although the class is new, Collier says he’s seeing progress. Just this semester, students have written editorials, features on teachers and articles promoting upcoming events. They are also taking many of their own photos.
“We have a new DSLR camera and some point-and-shoots, so they are learning photography,” Collier said during a February field trip to the University.
At Wingate, Forest Hills students teamed up with two of Professor John Coleman’s communications students to film three commercials and took part in Dr. Keith Cannon’s feature-writing class. After a session on social media led by a marketing major, they put their new photography skills to work in a #CaptureWingate contest. The group also got a behind-the-scenes look at the University’s ESPN3 broadcasting setup during a tour with Ryan Brown, assistant director of sports information.
Collier says the field trip to his alma mater was a “great learning experience for all of us.”
Beyond the technology, he wants students to understand the importance of communicating well and applying ethics to how they report.
“Everybody’s got a story to tell,” Collier tells his class. “Make sure you do it the right way. Don’t tell the story just to gain attention.”
“We see so much how media is misconstruing or is blamed for misconstruing things. It’s not always the case,” he adds. “But we need to have ethics when telling the story, not to decide to put this twist on it to gain more viewers or readers, but to tell it the right way. That will tell the story and live on.”
March 6, 2017
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