{"id":87091,"date":"2023-02-07T14:18:35","date_gmt":"2023-02-07T14:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.astound.com\/atvn\/?p=87091"},"modified":"2023-02-07T14:18:35","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T14:18:35","slug":"st-a-season-of-firsts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.astound.com\/atvn\/st-a-season-of-firsts\/","title":{"rendered":"A Season of Firsts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After Monday night\u2019s thrilling double overtime Bethlehem Catholic victory on ATVN and before preparing for our final regular season high school sports event of the winter on Tuesday, I did a little reflecting back over the last couple of months\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 1969, the Beatles formed an idea to \u201cGet Back\u201d to what they had done before their rise in fame with the way they would put their music together.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We had a similar idea at the ATVN studio this winter \u2013 to get back to putting our high school sports schedule together the way we did before COVID (and all the resulting after-effects) which slashed the way we had \u201cnormally\u201d covered local sports the last few years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0\u00a0At the same time, we additionally tried to incorporate brand new elements for our viewers, and succeeded by including the following list of &#8220;first-time ever&#8221; events broadcast on our network:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First-ever EPC girls basketball regular season game<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First-ever Colonial girls basketball regular season game<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First-ever Colonial League wrestling match\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First-ever women&#8217;s wrestling match\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First-ever girls basketball regular season doubleheader<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First Colonial baseball championship<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And\u2026 we also featured:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More Colonial League games than ever before<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More local schools than ever before<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Regular blog entries here on this website promoting women&#8217;s basketball and wrestling all season long<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We accomplished all the above while still bringing our audience many of the most competitive games of the year, including the two down-to-the-wire games we brought you last Monday (and, for anyone who spends any time around high school kids will tell you, it&#8217;s not always easy to predict what 15-year-olds will be like or how well they&#8217;ll play on any given day).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Things were complicated a bit by some rather dramatic (and last-minute) changes in \u201ctraditional\u201d scheduling by the local schools themselves as the officiating shortage is beginning to impact the scholastic sports landscape (more on this matter coming up later this year).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We have received a lot of great comments about what we were able to do this winter from our viewers and we were very happy that they took the time to share their opinions and positive thoughts about our new game plans with us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We made some bold predictions several months ago about what we were looking to accomplish and a number of things had to go right in order for us to pull all of them off.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thanks to a great effort by a lot of different people, and judging by the positive responses from our viewers\u2026we did it!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But speaking of offering \u201cthanks\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First, we could not have accomplished all of this without the incredible cooperation of the local schools and their athletic directors, administrators, coaches and staff.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To the teams and student athletes themselves for putting on some great performances, both with very competitive games and some great individual performances throughout the season.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our crew had to deal with some radical changes in how we implemented our schedule and were amazingly flexible and accommodating to some new ways of doing things, in addition to doing their usual first-rate, quality job in bringing local sports home to our viewers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our own ATVN administration was unbelievably helpful and supportive in enabling us to build our broadcast schedule and maintain our ability to carry out our goal to broaden our local coverage and try to satisfy the needs of as many of our viewers as humanly possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We also had unbelievably good fortunes from a weather perspective, which not only reduced our &#8220;normal&#8221; number of postponed contests but also (not counting the issues raised by the officiating shortage) kept radical rescheduling to a minimum this winter&#8230;I&#8217;ll leave that up to you in terms of assigning credit for that one.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Last and certainly not least, in addition to everything we did \u201csports-wise,\u201d our annual Dream Come True telethon raised a record amount of money this past winter and surpassed our total from two years ago by over $43,000.\u00a0 Once again, all the credit for this goes to our viewers for participating and donating money to this great cause, along with all the behind-the-scenes personnel involved in putting the entire event together.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But much like a coach will do after a quality win, our celebration will be short-lived as we get ready for our next chapter and look ahead to making even more additions and bringing in new elements for the next sports season.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Before we do, I did want to extend one more heartfelt appreciation for everyone&#8217;s efforts and a sincere &#8220;thank you&#8221; to everyone involved in this process.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now, let&#8217;s bring on the winter sports playoffs!!!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The views expressed in this blog are<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Astound Broadband or any other agency, organization, employer or company.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After Monday night\u2019s thrilling double overtime Bethlehem Catholic victory on ATVN and before preparing for our final regular season high school sports event of the winter on Tuesday, I did a little reflecting back over the last couple of months\u2026 In 1969, the Beatles formed an idea to \u201cGet Back\u201d to what they had done&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","category-the-sportstalk-shop"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- 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