JHHS students create documentary on '25 football season
Jackson Heights High School students got an early Christmas present before heading out for the holiday break on Friday, Dec. 19 — a screening of a 44-minute documentary on the Cobras’ 2025 football season, capturing the highs and the lows of the team’s 11-1 run this past fall.
The positive reactions of JHHS students to the documentary, “Cobra Ball,” made the documentary’s directors, sophomore Zachary Self and freshman Matthew DeVader, happy to know that the work they put into it this past semester was time well spent.
“It really warms my heart to see them all enjoy it,” Self said of his schoolmates’ reaction to the documentary. “It was quite a season to try and chronicle.”
Self, DeVader and other students created “Cobra Ball” as a documentary project in Brad Alley’s digital media class at JHHS. Alley said that he, too, was pleased with the finished product, which is now available for viewing at the Jackson Heights Cobra Cast channel on YouTube.com
“Both of them are pretty talented kids,” Alley said of Self and DeVader. “They had a clear vision of what they wanted, and they were able to execute it well. I thought they did an excellent job.”
Alley’s digital media class, a recent addition to the JHHS curriculum, attracted the likes of Self and DeVader, who had been making YouTube videos and working with computer-generated entertainment before joining the class.
“I’ve always been obsessed with working on computers,” DeVader said. “When I was 11, I made myself a Minecraft server. Then I went on to making videos on YouTube, so I thought this would be a good decision because I could then work with my peers and we could make a great thing together.”
Self, on the other hand, said the biggest thing for him is “capturing moments,” and “Cobra Ball” was a good way to capture those moments from the varsity football team’s 2025 season, from the early wins against Northeast Kansas League teams, to the dramatic, down-to-the-wire regional victory against Olpe, to the heartbreaking, season-ending loss to Rossville at the sub-state level.
For more on this and other stories, please log in to your holtonrecorder.net account and select “Dec. 24, 2025” under “E-Editions.”
