What’s recently happened?
This past September, the Whiting High School (WHS) wrestling team started practicing for the upcoming season with Coach Daniel Hartman. Hartman helped lead the team towards improvement, including helping two freshmen win Sectionals and giving them a chance to compete at Regionals last year.
Wrestling helps these athletes to build strength and agility. It can also help them mentally to teach discipline. Wrestling is important to all athletes on the team and the coaches.
The coaches hope to take the team as far as they can this season and work on everybody's strengths. All coaches this season have high hopes for their team and think if they push hard enough they can do some good this season.
In-season practices started November 4, and the team is looking forward to getting back on track. Hoping to go as far as possible this season, the team’s main goal is to improve as both individuals and as a team.
What’s coming up?
The Science Olympiad team is getting ready for its first invitational at the end of November. The team has been putting in work since mid-September preparing for its events.
Each student gets up to five events to study throughout the year in preparation for invites at different schools during the season. These events can range from building towers, testing powders, and studying stars in space.
This year WHS will start showing its skills at the Northridge High School invite, instead of the usual Whiting invite. This starts at the beginning of the official season, as the team works their way up to the state.
Staff spotlight:
Patrick Pecher is the director of the elementary, middle, and high school bands and choirs at WHS. He also teaches general music from kindergarten through fifth grade and seventh grade. Pecher has been teaching music for 25 years all at WHS.
Music was something that Pecher has always had at every point in his life.
In middle school, he developed a love for choir and he continued to be a part of that throughout high school. He was able to focus his attention on something he enjoyed and realized that music was a part of everything that got him through life, and his teachers were such an important part of that. This gave him the realization that he wanted to be a teacher – he wanted to give back what his previous teacher had given him.
“I got through my life growing up with music and my teachers being such an integral part of that. I wanted to be a teacher as a way to pay back those teachers for everything they did for me, and my family is full of teachers. My grandmother was a teacher. Two of my aunts were teachers. My sister was a teacher, so it was basically the family business,” said Pecher.
Pecher went to Vandercook College of Music in Chicago. There he learned to play 24 instruments and was a part of the school’s band and choir. Throughout those four years of college, he moved from wanting to be a choir director to a band director.
Working with the elementary students is Pecher’s favorite part about teaching since everything is new for the students there. Every day they are learning something new and are excited to learn and participate.
“Every new concept they are excited about. They want to learn, they want to play, they want to sing, they want to dance, they want to do all of those things. As you move to the upper grades, you lose that ability to be free to sing and dance because you're all nervous about what people are thinking. They're just so happy and excited,” said Pecher.
Pecher also said he just enjoys being able to make music. He believes he’s never had to work a day in his life because he loves what he does. From the moment he enters the school to the moment he leaves, he and his students are making music.
While predominantly teaching band, Pecher enjoys watching every grade progress. Many students start band in fifth grade and are still playing in high school. He said it was a unique opportunity to get to see kids he had been teaching since they were 5 improve and eventually graduate.
Student spotlight:
Joaquin Sanchez is a junior at WHS and an active member of the band. He is known for his intelligent brain and maintaining his top 10 spot for many years.
Sanchez has been in the band since fifth grade, making this his seventh year. His favorite part of the band is all the events since he gets to travel and play outside of WHS. He also enjoys being able to go and have fun after their performance.
This year Sanchez joined the Science Olympiad team. He joined this year because he wanted to be a part of as many activities as he could with his high school years ending soon. He said he has a ton of fun in everything he does and encourages others to go and try.
This year Sanchez’s goal is to pass all his AP tests in the future. He plans to accomplish these by reviewing where he struggles the most and study what he knows well until it is muscle memory.
After high school, he plans to go to Purdue University West Lafayette but also hopes to push himself enough to get into Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In college, he hopes to go into cyber security as his major.
“I plan on going into cyber security as my major because I’ve always had a fascination with computers and what goes on inside the hardware. That’s when I got invested in programming since I love to play video games and know how they are made. I could be something similar to that makes me proud to pursue it,” said Sanchez.
Sanchez advises underclassmen to enjoy themselves in high school and to not stress over complex subjects they don’t understand well.