Prospect senior wins major student journalism honor

Prospect High School senior Mike Stanford of Arlington Heights has landed one of the biggest awards in high school journalism: sports story of the year from the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association.

He is the first student at Prospect to achieve this distinction, say officials with Northwest Suburban High School District 214.

School board members at their December meeting honored Stanford, as well as the rest of the editors of the Prospector, who helped the paper take second place in the "best of show" category for the overall look of one edition, cover to cover.

Stanford's story, "East vs. West: Is this a fair fight?" was chosen the number one sports story out of 3,000 students that competed.

"It's like winning the Pulitzer Prize for sports writing," says Jason Block, Prospect's newspaper adviser. "I can't overstate it enough, what he accomplished."

Stanford's story ran a year ago in the Prospector and he estimates he spent nearly six weeks on the reporting. In it, he explores the playing field between high schools in the Mid Suburban League East and West.

Schools in the MSL East division include Barrington, Conant, Fremd, Hoffman Estates, Palatine and Schaumburg high schools, while West division schools take in Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove, Hersey, Prospect, Rolling Meadows and Wheeling.

"I wanted to write this story for a while," says Stanford, now editor-in-chief of the Prospector. "As a tennis player, I saw how the West Division wins more than the East. From talking to my friends and attending football games, it seemed like there easily could have been a larger trend."

He decided to research the number of conference titles each division had won over the previous five years, as well as to compare enrollment and income levels of high school communities.

He developed spreadsheets with his results and eventually put them into graphics, which ran with the story.

"The correlation was pretty clear, especially with school size," Stanford says. "Schools with large and wealthy populations like Barrington and Fremd had much higher winning percentages.

"Small and less affluent ones like Wheeling and Hoffman Estates struggled," he adds, "and the majority of the smaller schools were in the East."

Overall, he concludes, the differences led to the West winning 72.6 percent of conference titles since 2010.

Block says the sheer amount of reporting that Stanford did made his story stand out.

"The emails, the interviews, researching the tax and income levels, and the number of sources," Block says. "This goes beyond the box scores and what most sports writers do. This is the kind of reporting I see at the professional level."

And Block should know. Before joining Prospect's staff 12 years ago, he worked as a sports editor for papers in West Chicago and Freeport.

Stanford knew the timing was right for his story. It broke at the same time that school district officials in the North and Northwest suburbs talked about a partial realignment with the Central Suburban League.

Stanford learned that for two years, teams from the MSL would play two crossover games with teams from the CSL that have similar enrollments to their own. The arrangement began this school year.

Prospect, for example, played Niles North and Glenbrook North last season, whose enrollments are within 100 students of Prospect's.

The MSL-CSL realignment "goes far enough at the current time to address the current situation," Prospect football coach Mike Sebestyen said in Stanford's story of the findings.

Stanford and his fellow staff members picked up their awards at the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association's annual convention, held in Indianapolis.

Grace Berry and Diana Leane joined with Stanford to accept the Prospector's second-place award for Best of Show. The Crest, Prospect's yearbook, took eighth place in a similar competition, marking its first time placing in this event. And Prospect junior Leo Garkisch received a superior rating in Sports Editorial Writing.