About ten years ago, Marty Harig — Seneca's tech director — sat down with a student named Levi Maierhofer and built something. They called it Irish Live: a student-run broadcast operation that streams Seneca athletic events and school activities to anyone who wants to watch, anywhere, for free.

No NFHS subscription fees. No paywall. Grandma in Arizona pulls it up on her phone and watches her grandson play basketball with full commentary, a sideline camera, and a scoreboard graphic running in the corner.

"I don't do a lot, to be honest with you," Harig said of his current role. "These kids do a lot of the troubleshooting on their own."

The kids in question — seniors Vinny Corrado, Lilly Pfeifer, and Chloey Coyne, plus junior Dane Ferrara — have been the backbone of Irish Live for the past three to four years. Between them, they've brought in roughly ten new members this year alone. The program now has fifteen to twenty students involved, with a core group of about ten doing most of the work.

On a game night, the operation has the feel of a real broadcast. Dane runs the engineering side — Wirecast software feeding into YouTube, scoreboard overlays tracking live from the gym floor, and Canon cameras wired in from the sideline. Chloey handles the sideline camera. The crew communicates through headsets. "That is my saving grace," Chloey said. Announcers call the action. Vinny has been doing play-by-play since his freshman year.

Things go wrong constantly. Wirecast crashes, scoreboards glitch, and streams need full restarts. Dane: "Something always goes wrong, but it always gets done." The five minutes it once took to restart a full stream mid-game felt like an eternity. Opening basketball games are especially nerve-wracking — getting the stream live before tip-off is its own high-stakes sequence. The pressure, Dane said, is "really good for critical thinking."

Beyond live sports, Dane and the team record band concerts, musicals, and plays — editing them for upload so families who couldn't attend can watch a polished version later. They covered the opening of the new gym and the new baseball field with dedicated camera setups. They produce Athlete of the Week segments. Vinny has conducted halftime coach interviews that play during breaks in the live stream. Some events — Irish Fest — are deliberately left unstreamed. The point is to get people there.

"When things are going badly, we don't freak out," Chloey said. "We just figured out a new way to do it." Lilly offered the other side of the Seneca Way coin: "With a school as small as this, even just one bad juju accident — it's gonna get out."

Where they're all headed next is telling. Vinny is going into concrete finishing and plans to join the concrete union. He frames what Irish Live gave him plainly: "It helped me evolve my problem-solving skills." Lilly is deciding between Monmouth College and Illinois State for music education. Dane — still a junior, the program's returning anchor — is planning to pursue broadcast journalism and mass communications. And Chloey got accepted to both DePaul and Loyola for a double major in film and professional writing, after submitting a portfolio of her Irish Live camera work to get into the film programs. "Ironically, Irish Live is what got me into it," she said.

None of them started out knowing it would work that way. They just kept showing up, fixing what broke, and pointing cameras at their school.