CatamountsLIVE: How it became part of Panther Creek’s athletic community

All it took to create CatamountsLIVE was a motivated, talented student not afraid to ruffle some feathers.

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Alex Zietlow, Reporter
May 5, 2015

It was the fifth week of school.  Panther Creek News Network had only published one story in the 2014-2015 school year.  Dr. Hedrick had not even started acting as the school’s principal yet.

And he had already stirred some controversy with Panther Creek authority.

Ian Pierno was established as the sports editor for PCNN at the beginning of the school year.  The senior, along with the rest of the newspaper staff, wanted the school’s sole news distributor to gain in popularity.

“I was trying to think of ways to boost our readership and things like that.  I thought maybe having a social media presence would be a great way to do that,” Pierno said.

“We already had a PCNN twitter account with not a very big follower base, so I decided to try to make a PCNN sports account where we could live tweet games and tweet links to articles.  That really was the extent of how far it was going to go.”

Friday, September 19, 2014, the Panther Creek Catamounts took on the Leesville Road Pride in their second home game of the season.  PCNN staff had live tweeted a football game before, but this was Pierno’s first go-around.

Panther Creek defeated Leesville Road 27-0.

The following Monday at 11:24 AM, Panther Creek’s newspaper staff came into their classroom with the tweet below on the projector.

Keep in mind, when originally published these tweets were under the “@pcnnsports” twitter handle.

 

“[Mr. Hoey] told everyone to get a clicker to vote, and I was like ‘what would we be voting on?’, and he said, ‘I call it the good tweet bad tweet game’,” Pierno said.   Despite having the first tweet being positive, one of the few occasions where the majority of the class voted “good tweet”, Mr. Hoey pointed out many flaws in this reporting in some of the tweets that followed it.  He explained that since PCNN is a branch of Panther Creek, the school is held responsible for its actions. “I was impressed with how strong the coverage was, how detailed the coverage was, all of the fantastic things that should be in a live tweet of a sporting event.  There were also tweets that seemed to run counter to the sportsmanship that we try to maintain at Panther Creek High School,” Hoey said. “We live in a society that loves to have fun, and poke fun, and we have some great rivalries; its part of the game,” Hoey conveyed.  “What is in good fun and what goes too far is something that we adults can’t predict.”

 

Mr. Hoey admitted that teachers and administrators think in extremes.  And in an attempt to be proactive and avoid a worst-case scenario, Mr. Hoey could no longer tolerate “@pcnnsports” as a social media presence under his watch.

“Basically I was reprimanded for some of my tweets, one of which I quoted the student section when they chanted ‘where is Braxton?’ in reference to Leesville’s former star player,” Pierno said.

“As a journalist, I thought I was reporting the facts because that was what was happening, but it was little things like that that were nitpicked a lot and I think that is what basically led them to not having @PCNNsports exist anymore.”

For the most part, that was true.  Pierno’s subjective tweets on the game including his commenting on an instance of aggressive coaching conduct, reporting of a player’s injury, and his innocent taunting of Panther Creek’s opponent was chalked-up as inappropriate behavior when acting under the PCNN umbrella.

But Pierno took it a step further while controlling @PCNNsports, stepping even further into the spotlight and gaining the attention of the president of ABC11 as well as the official Wake County Public School System twitter account.

“When the username was still @PCNNsports, following the car accident at the beginning of the year, ABC11 had posted a video following the accident and it included the driver in a pretty emotional state.  The student was an athlete so I was kind of representing [the Panther Creek athletic community],” Pierno said.

 

  “The tweet had a lot of support from WCPSS and the Panther Creek student body, which may have added to the CatamountsLIVE buzz.  But I was just standing up for what I believed in.”

While September 19th was a milestone in PCNN exposure and support, it nearly marked the end to an account that Pierno had already invested a lot of time and effort in.  L.J. Hepp, Panther Creek’s Athletic Director, made it clear to Mr. Hoey that this type of activity on social media should not be done on an account associated with the school.

“When it was brought to me, I felt like there were a few options,” Hepp said.

Hepp essentially laid out two ways in which PCNN can continue to live tweet sporting events.

    1. Continue tweeting under the original PCNN twitter account after agreeing to guidelines outlining appropriate and inappropriate behavior.  Notice, this is not the PCNN Sports account, which is what Pierno ran when reporting on the PC vs LR football game.
    2. Continue tweeting content comparable to Pierno’s tweets, but have the account be independent from the school.

To be clear, Hepp did not give Pierno the suggestion to begin a new twitter account; this option was explored by Pierno himself knowing he didn’t have to answer to anyone if he made his own, personal twitter account.

After gaining a fairly large following a week or two prior to the game that changed everything, down went @PCNNsports.  But Pierno took this defeat and transformed it into another opportunity to continue doing what he loves.

He decided to change the name of the account to CatamountsLIVE instead of deleting the account altogether.  But Pierno wanted to do more with it, including trying his hand at live broadcasting.

“I thought, you know, I’m still going to tweet articles from there, still live tweet games, but there’s still more I want to do because I wasn’t getting class credit for it anymore.  I’ve always admired professional commentators and people like that, so [Jamie Patel] and I decided to give it a shot.”

Footage of the CatamountsLive crew - Ian Pierno and Jamie Patel.
Footage of the original CatamountsLIVE crew – Ian Pierno and Jamie Patel.

“We started broadcasting a couple soccer games and we actually got more listeners than we expected, and we thought, ‘wait, this could be a thing’.”

Pierno continued to write for PCNN and tweeted out game recaps, scores, and general updates on Panther Creek’s sports program.  He began being listened to and read from people all around the country – whether that is parents out of town, alumni in college curious about the past teams they’ve played on, etc.

The athletes loved his rise in popularity, too.  Pierno’s effort to follow and report every sport equally built a sense of community around Panther Creek.

Basically, he has become a part of Panther Creek Athletics.

  “I got James Kemple, who’s a staff writer for PCNN, and him and I started commentating the football games together.  We thought we got a lot of listeners for the soccer games, but it was totally different for football.  Each game our listener base grew exponentially, and same with the twitter page,” Pierno said. “I wasn’t getting paid for it or anything – it was mostly because I loved doing it.” Everything really started to accelerate when J. Mike Blake, an editor at the News and Observer, noticed what Pierno was doing with CatamountsLIVE and recognized his talent as a journalist.  Blake ended up offering Pierno a freelance job for the News & Observer and Cary News, and Pierno has covered multiple sporting events since, including many Panther Creek basketball games.   And how do you think he promoted his first published article?  CatamountsLIVE. (Tweet below was retweeted by @CatamountsLIVE)

“I think Ian has grown tremendously, as a journalist and as a person,” Hoey said.

“Objectively talking about Ian’s growth, at the beginning of the school year he was the Sports Editor for PCNN.  Now that we’re getting closer to the ending of the school year, he has articles that have appeared in the News and Observer, other publications, and he has gained a reputation for himself among the professional journalists in our area.”

Ian Pierno was surprised to find an article of his on the front page of the N&O.
Ian Pierno was surprised to find an article of his on the front page of the Cary News.

In regards to Pierno’s opportunity to write for his local newspaper, he shared it “couldn’t have turned out any better.”

“I was pretty frustrated at the beginning with how @PCNNsports turned out and then it just turned out to be a big blessing in disguise.”

Thursday, April 30th, Ian Pierno and CatamountsLIVE made another giant leap for PCNN, publishing an article that described Trevor Fick’s controversial experience with football recruiting at Davidson College.

“Trevor came to me and told me about the situation and told me ‘you should write an article about it’,” Pierno said.  “He had a lot of contacts at Davidson like the coaches and different people he had talked to such as the Dean of Admissions and whatnot.”

Pierno, seeing the article as a new “challenge” for him to undertake, spent nearly three weeks constructing and writing the story.

“I’ve always wanted to write an article that meant something.  I’ve been writing sports for a while, but in the end, what does it all mean?  It doesn’t change anything; it’s just a report.”

In order to write the story, Pierno needed to do loads of research, talk to multiple people associated with Davidson Athletics and accept the fact that his findings may not be tolerated by everyone.  But as Pierno admits (as if Panther Creek didn’t already know this), he’s “never been afraid to try new things and ruffle some feathers.”
Ian Pierno

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“I was pretty frustrated at the beginning with how PCNN sports turned out and then it turned out to be a big blessing in disguise.

— Ian Pierno

“I’m not going to lie, in the beginning I was somewhat intimidated.  The first contact I made with Davidson was Paul Nichols, their head football coach.  If you listen to the audio in the beginning you can tell that I’m a little nervous, you know?  But by the end of the audio, you can tell that the roles have flipped and he’s tripping over his own words.” “When I talked to Christopher Gruber, Davidson’s Dean of Admissions, I ‘went in’.  After that first one, I gained a new kind of confidence.” So Pierno wrote the story, and tweeted it under the CatamountsLIVE account, which was customary.  But CatamountsLIVE was a bit more bold than usual.

“When I tweeted the links to the article, I  tagged their admissions office, the president of the university, the athletics department, the athletics funding department, the NCAA, and the Pioneer football conference,” Pierno said.

“That’s the point of being a journalist.  You’re supposed to tell a story and have people see it.  And they were a part of the story so I thought they should read it. I thought if the right eyes saw it, maybe there could be some positive change.”

Just a day after the story was published (5/1/15, 11:52 AM), the story had already eclipsed 3,200 total page-views.  The previous record was 286 views.  It was held by Pierno as well.

At press time, the article had over 4,000 page views.

What really amazed Pierno and the rest of the PCNN staff was the response to the tweet across the state.  The reactions were shocking in both quantity and quality.  

 

 

 

“The thing that I love about teaching the newspaper class is that you guys get to experience what it’s like to write stories, but also experience the consequences of the stories you write,” Hoey said.

“By Ian starting his own twitter account, he gained some of the independence that a real journalist might have.  But at the same time, he took on a lot of the liability that an independent source would also take on.”

CatamountsLIVE’s impact on Panther Creek is still continuing today.  While Pierno is a spring athlete so a lot of his games overlap with other spring sports, he still has a few big plans for CatamountsLIVE to undertake.

“It had to slow down a little bit but we were still tweeting updates and writing articles; whether I write for PCNN or the News and Observer I’m still sharing the links and things like that,” Pierno said.

“I’ve talked to Rod Morton, who’s a member of the booster club and he runs a live update software for the baseball games, and we talked about collaborating.  And of course, I’m hoping Panther Creek Women’s Soccer makes another run at the state championship, and if they do, it would be so fun to commentate a state championship game.”

But what happens when Pierno graduates?

“Will from time to time someone with Ian’s talent and ability and energy come up? Yeah, and then a CatamountsLIVE may exist for a school year…and then we may not have it again until another Ian-type surfaces,” Hepp said.

CatamountsLIVE did its part in uniting not only the athletic community at Panther Creek but also the SWAC athletic community.  It’s brought unprecedented exposure to PCNN, and has taken a lot of time and effort to build, promote, and maintain.

It is not in the school’s best interest for CatamountsLIVE to die.

“

Will from time to time someone with Ian’s talent and ability and energy come up? Yeah, and then a CatamountsLive may exist for a school year…and then we may not have it again until another Ian-type surfaces.

— L.J. Hepp

The obvious solution would be for Pierno to pass the torch down to a younger, highly motivated, and talented writer interested in running CatamountsLIVE.  As for now, however, Pierno is still  exploring his options.

“I’ve had some underclassmen interested,” Pierno said.  “And to be honest I really have no idea of what I’m going to do.”

The current twitter picture for CatamountsLive.
The current logo for CatamountsLIVE.

Hepp, who has been a spoken supporter of Pierno and CatamountsLIVE, has even thought of incorporating CatamountsLIVE into Panther Creek’s curriculum – somewhat similar to Middle Creek’s CTE program “Sports Block“.

“If you had a program that was built into the curriculum it would be able to sustain students coming through the program,” Hepp said.  “The other component of that is it is difficult as all of our demands continue to grow in the world that we live in these days it’s harder to get more folks to volunteer time.”

 

While Hepp’s goal of making a course centered around the idea of CatamountsLIVE is pretty lofty, it throws an intriguing question onto the table: “What impact can a motivated sports editor to a relatively unheard of online newspaper make?” The answer seems clear.

And to imagine CatamountsLIVE started with Ian Pierno getting himself into hot water is even more remarkable.

According to Pierno’s adviser Mr. Hoey, however, Pierno did more Friday, September 19th, than simply ruffle some feathers. Hoey believes he showed what he could eventually be.

“It wouldn’t be right to characterize [the Leesville game] as a disaster.  There were a lot of fantastic things that he did in that game,” Mr. Hoey said.  “Those things are what you can see as to how he made a following as CatamountsLIVE.”