Podcast shares stories of Cobra athletics
By Melissa Rollins
Editor
editor@newsandpress.net
For fans of Coker sports, there is now a way to keep up with current student-athletes and find out more about the history of the school’s sports: the Quiver Podcast. Started by Scott Sewell, Assistant Director for Athletic Media Relations, the podcast, delves into what drives student-athletes and the ways that Coker’s sports have changed over the years.
Sewell is less than a month into his new role but already enjoying the opportunity to work with students and coaches.
“My wife got a job here at Coker and I looked at it as an opportunity for me to go back to school and do something that I’m actually passionate about,” Sewell said. “For me, that’s always been sports; I grew up a big sports fan. I saw some opportunities in the athletics department here to help out. Once I did that, I realized how rewarding it was to work with the coaching staff and the student-athletes on a daily basis. That is so much better than looking at spreadsheets and raising the price of textbooks for kids.”
Day-to-day, Sewell said that he wears many different hats.
“I have an assigned group of sports that I work with,” he said. “I will work directly with those coaches who may, for instance, need a graphic created or some sort of marketing material created. A big part of my job is being at games and keeping stats, announcing games, setting up for games. Really anything having to do with athletics, I’ve got some hand in it from the media relations side.”
The idea to use the name Quiver for his podcast came from a very unexpected place, Sewell said.
“I was watching the tv show Cobra Kai, which is a spinoff of the Karate Kid,” he said. “One of the episodes is called the Quiver and on the opening scene it said the definition of a quiver is a group of cobras. I had no idea and if you talk to people here they didn’t realize it either. We all learned something.”
Hosting a podcast is a natural fit for Sewell, if you asked his friends.
“I am obsessed with podcasts; I listen to them constantly,” Sewell said. “A common joke is that I start every statement with, ‘I was just listening to a podcast today’ and my friends are constantly making fun of me about that.
I love podcasts and I am really passionate about sports so this just seemed like a great way, a really good format, to tell the student-athletes’ stories here at Coker in a more intimate way. You can really get their experiences from themselves.”
Along with sharing stories from the athletes currently filling Coker’s rosters, Sewell is delving into the college’s yearbooks.
“One of the really neat aspects of the podcast is getting to talk to some of the former athletes who were here in the 80’s and early 90’s,” Sewell said. “It has been interesting hearing them talk about what Hartsville and Coker were like then; it is so different. I just talked to a guy named Bird Brown who played soccer. He was saying that the campus was like 250 people when he was here. He was part a team that was 20 kids so his team was 10 percent of the campus. It was a different ecosystem for the school; it was such a different world back then. Apparently the space where the DeLoach Center is was a hospital. (Brown) said that if a player got heat sickness or something they would carry them across the street to the hospital; that is very different than now.”
The ability to share those stories in the voices of the people who initially experienced them is exciting, Sewell said.
“On campus we often have guest speakers. There was an instructor from another school who was talking about this oral history of the town where the college is,” Sewell said. “They had met with these people who had been in the town 50 and 60 years; they grew up there. She did video recordings of them telling the stories of this town. I was taken in by this; I’ve always been interested in oral history. I think it is just a really interesting way to learn about a time that you weren’t a part of, to hear it directly from the people who were. I thought this podcast format could be especially good for doing that. For reaching back into Coker history and bringing some of those events to life today.”
Find the podcast online at https://www.buzzsprout.com/190822 or in the iTunes store.
