Over the last few years, Millard West athletes have had a source for anything media-related, ranging from pictures to stories to live streams.
Senior Samuel Whittaker has taken the role of the go-to guy for athletes who want to have professional-quality photos and graphics for free. Whittaker has covered the football, hockey, basketball, and baseball teams to the max.
Despite doing sports-related media since his freshman year, Whittaker didn’t initially plan on doing journalism. In fact, he didn’t even consider it until a friend reached out to him.
“I decided to initially try out journalism in my freshman year after a senior friend of mine recommended it to me,” Whittaker said. “I came into high school with a rough plan of becoming an architect, but once I got out of school with a camera, I realized if I worked hard enough, I could potentially make a career out of sports media.”
While getting into sports media, Whittaker took a particular interest in the Millard West hockey team, as he covered them for a majority of his high school career. Even though he never played on the ice for Millard West, he and the team had a bond, and they considered him part of the team.
“I am forever in debt to everyone who was connected with Millard West hockey in the past three and a half years,” Whittaker said. “Saying goodbye to the hockey team was definitely the hardest one in my entire high school media career just because they were the group I truly found my stride with.”
A star forward who is also the captain of the team has extremely high praise for Whittaker. It meant a lot to have someone so closely associated with the team.
“Having someone outside of a player care this much about our team meant so much to us,” senior Reece Wilson said. “Sam spent so much time on our team, and it really means the world to us because we all appreciate all he’s done for us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without him.
His involvement in hockey has been noteworthy around the Omaha metro as well, as he worked with the Omaha Lancers, a tier one junior hockey team in the United States Hockey League.
“I first realized that Sam might have a future in this area when we took him to an Omaha Lancer game and he fell in love with hockey,” Sam’s mom, Shelly Heenan said. “He quickly became an expert on anything hockey-related. The beginning was when he developed a hype video for the Lancers using only his phone, which the Lancers then started to play at the start of their games for the second half of the season. Everyone was impressed with his skill.”
Whittaker doesn’t charge money for the graphics, as he is satisfied with the appreciation of his classmates.
“Just knowing that all of my peers have an appreciation for me like that to be their go-to guy for photos and graphics is unmatched, and I won’t ever have the right words to express how grateful I am to them,” Whittaker said. “They’re all the bulk of my support through socials, and while I never want it to be about the numbers, it truly does mean so much that so many people consider me to be their go-to guy.”
Writing stories and making broadcasts is another form of media that Whittaker has done, and while the work he puts out has always been of a high caliber, he has still developed quite a bit over the years as a journalist.
“He’s grown a lot as a storyteller,” journalism adviser Mark Hilburn said. “He is someone who is really open to feedback as he wants to continue to get better, and I think he would agree if you look at what he was turning in freshman and sophomore year, compared to what he is turning in now. At this point, there are very few edits from me, and he still learns new techniques and takes risks in his storytelling.”
With all of the incredible work that he has done, he has the people mentioned previously in the article to thank for his dedication and improvement throughout the years.
“My mom and Mr. Hilburn have always been the two biggest pieces of keeping me grounded and being supportive throughout my entire journey of sports media throughout high school,” Whittaker said. “My mom has always been tuning in to almost every game, sharing it with family, her friends, etc. Hilburn on the other hand is the entire reason I’m able to do this, as he gave me access to do this because he gave me access to all of this equipment and taught me how to be a fair and balanced sports journalist.”
It’s fair to say that everyone involved in Millard West athletics is pretty confident that Whittaker has an incredibly bright future ahead of him, and we all expect his voice on the radio someday soon.
