Courtesy | Abigail Snyder
Two Hillsdale students won national awards on Friday for content they produced for the campus radio station, WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.
Senior Rachel Kookogey won both first and fourth place for Best Sports Reporting, and sophomore Abigail Snyder won second for Best Regularly Scheduled Entertainment Program in the College Broadcasters Inc. 2021 National Student Production Awards.
“It’s gratifying to receive the recognition from a national organization like CBI, because there are so many college radio stations across the country who are submitting,” said Scot Bertram, general manager of WRFH and lecturer in journalism. “They had more than a thousand entries, in those dozen categories or so.”
Bertram said he was glad to see his students’ hard work pay off.
“Both Rachel’s entries and Abigail’s entry were excellent and really top-notch work, and so it was not a surprise to see them among the finalists, but to receive the recognition from those that listened to entries from across the country from many radio stations,” he said. “That’s very satisfying to have others acknowledge how hard our students are working and the quality of the content they’re producing.”
Kookogey’s award-winning work is a three-minute feature called “Sports Storytime.”
“Basically I tell crazy stories from the hockey world, because I’m a big hockey fan,” she said. “I do a lot of digging into the story side of the world and just things that I think would be interesting to anybody, whether they’re a sports fan or not.”
From her first episode on the longest overtime ever to her first-place feature on hockey superstitions, Kookogey said she has loved her COVID-19 “pet project.”
The show began when the situation surrounding COVID-19 prevented Kookogey and her friend from continuing their hockey talk show “Coast to Coast.”
At home in Nashville, Kookogey sat under a blanket in her closet to muffle the sound, and recorded the pilot for “Sports Storytime” with her laptop microphone. She has been doing the feature ever since.
“I think it’s really cool to earn national recognition doing something fun that I love, talking about something I love to talk about,” she said.
Kookogey has also recorded various other programs on the air and is now the program director for WRFH.
“It’s become a big part of my time here at Hillsdale, and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.
“I’m so glad for the opportunity that Hillsdale has a radio station,” Kookogey said. “Some radio stations moved to a totally digital podcast formatting, so I’m really grateful that even at a small school like Hillsdale we have such a great journalism program and such a great radio station.”
Four days after her award was announced, Snyder recorded the 32nd episode of her armchair-travel show “The Virtual Voyage,” in which she brings listeners on a weekly journey to experience biblical and historical sights in Israel.
“I was inspired to start it, because, during the pandemic, people couldn’t travel, and Israel shut down,” Snyder said. “I was especially drawn to Israel because I’ve lived there for three summers, and I thought it would be really cool to be able to take people there in a virtual sense through the medium of radio.”
Snyder said she was honored to have her show rank second place nationally.
“I think of my show as something that I do for friends and family and for myself, to have my trip documented,” she said. “To have other people– not biased towards me, not here at Hillsdale, not related to me, not my friends, recognizing it as a good show — inspires me to continue working and continue to do it every week.”
