"COMPETING AGAINST DISCRIMINATION"
A Uni High/WILL Production
Now available:
WILL AM-580 Web site

URBANA — If you missed last weekend's broadcast premiere of the new Uni High radio documentary, don't worry. Thanks to online audio, you can now listen to it anytime you'd like.

The hourlong program, "Competing Against Discrimination: Achieving Equality in Athletics at the University of Illinois," is now available on the WILL Web site as both a RealAudio archive and an MP3 download.

The documentary originally aired on WILL AM-580 at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Senior Annie Machesky and junior Maria Gao produced the program in conjunction with WILL's Dave Dickey; they also narrated the program.

Other students who served on the editing team were junior Katherine Allen and sophomores Katherine Floess, Sheela Gogula, Youyang Gu (who has since moved), and Adam Joseph.

The show is based on 16 interviews with former U of I athletes and other members of the local community conducted by the Uni High Class of 2011. The students did the research as part of their subfreshman oral history project under the direction of social studies executive teacher Janet Morford.

On Saturday afternoon, students and teachers, WILL staff members, interviewees, families, and friends celebrated the completion of the project with a reception in the main lobby of Campbell Hall, 300 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana. The group then listened to the program before the official premiere.

According to Dickey, some 50 to 60 CDs containing the program will be made. The CD cover design will be selected from entries in a student contest, he said.

The documentary is another in the long line of cooperative projects between Uni High and WILL. Dating back to the 1990s, the station has worked with student volunteers to transform subfreshman oral history interviews into tightly edited hourlong programs. Many of these have gone on to win major communications awards.

Last fall, WILL aired “Widgets and Digits: Technological History, Research and Invention at the University of Illinois,” executive-produced by 2008 alum Ruthie Welch and co-produced and narrated by Gao and classmate Maritza Mestre. That program evolved out of the Class of 2010's subfreshman project.

Another documentary, about the impact of the women's movement on the C-U community, is scheduled to be completed later this fall. Mestre and classmate Linda Ly are co-producing the project, which is based on the Class of 2012's oral history interviews.

Working with them are juniors Alexx Engles, Rachel Harmon, Hadley Hauser, and sophomores Jenny Cooke, Amanda Hwu, Zach Korol-Gold, and Revathi Maturi.

In addition, several new interns, all current freshmen, have worked since May on the gender equity project — "for example, by writing summaries of background research that the older interns were not involved in but which was crucial material for the script," according to Morford.

These eight students will be given credit as part of that team: Amalia Dolan, Aishwarya Gautam, Christina Harden, Sarah Heffley, Anna Rubakhina, Marina Shah, Shruti Vaidya, and Sarah Joy Yockey.