Thanks to the 450 student-athletes from 50 area high schools who visited our newsroom for Year 14 of Faces of Fall.
Since 2012, more than 11,000 kids — all in uniform, many accompanied by parents — have taken part in a fun-filled project that involves portraits, interviews, autographs, radio spots and a heavy dose of social media (hard to believe that some of them are now in theirs 30s).
At Sunday’s main event, we welcomed first-year participants Decatur MacArthur, Maroa-Forsyth, Meridian, St. Teresa and Warrensburg-Latham. The addition of Macon County schools — Mount Zion joined the mix a year ago — is in conjunction with our growing radio operation as students produced promotional announcements that will play in the Decatur market on stations like WSOY and WDZQ.
Producer Ed Bond, who along with Dave Leake guided students through the radio process Sunday, said more than 250 spots will begin airing on our 11 stations this week. They sound fantastic (visit news-gazette.com for a listen).
Later this month, we’ll begin running portraits and Q&As in print editions and publish sport-by-sport photo galleries at our website. We’ll share it all on our many social media accounts. And, soon, we’ll make available frameable N-G front-page posters featuring anyone who has attended Faces of Fall/Winter/Spring since Day 1. Yep, all 11,000 of you.
