When the Arizona Interscholastic Association decided that during the winter sports season, schools would have to  limit crowds to just two parents or guardians per player for only home teams, high schools had to figure ways to reach their fans.

Live streaming was an answer.

Phoenix St. Mary’s boys basketball coach Damin Lopez didn’t sulk about losing the Bleacher Creatures, the rabid student section. He found equipment and called one of his former St. Mary’s players, Chris Fahrendorf, knowing he was in the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Fahrendorf, who is looking to get into sports print journalism, knows the history of St. Mary’s basketball, being a fourth generation Fahrendorf who went to St. Mary’s and played basketball.

His ASU roommate, Alex Coil, has a passion for broadcasting, growing up in Indiana, playing basketball at Valparaiso High School.

It was a perfect broadcast pairing, Coil doing the play-by-play with Fahrendorf providing commentary, breaking games down with analysis and history as if they were seasoned pros.

They’ve even taken the broadcasts on the road, where junior center Jeremiah Cherry’s father, Darnell, is the cameraman.

Jaxon Rideau, who played for St. Mary’s last year and graduated in May, is the statistician for the broadcasts.

“We really do believe we have the best broadcasts in Arizona for high school basketball,” Fahrendorf said. “We try to do it professionally.”

Fahrendorf has a good critic in Phoenix Suns’ television broadcaster Tom Leander, who was his next-door neighbor for about eight years, growing up.

“He’s tuned in a couple of games,” Fahrendorf said. “He got me into the sports journalism industry. Even he said, ‘It’s really professional.’ It’s nice to hear that from someone in the industry.”

Lopez said the St. Mary’s boys basketball YouTube games are watched all over the country and in Mexico.

“We had a vision to create an atmosphere that tied our players to the St. Mary’s community,” said Lopez, who has his top-ranked Knights playing at home Thursday night against Prescott Valley Bradshaw Mountain in the 4A semifinals. “This team had so much hype and rightfully so, people wanted to see them play.

“Players wanted to be seen and perform for our community, their fellow students, the Bleacher Creatures and their friends and family. The only way to do that was to create an online option.”

Coil said the first game they did on YouTube got 1,900 views. The Brophy Prep rivalry game got 1,500.

“It has stayed over a thousand,” Coil said. “The last few games have hit the 1,000 mark. They’re watching from all over the country.”

He said he knew this team was going to be special, so to be able to help share the Knights’ journey during COVID was important.

“A lot of people care about St. Mary’s and St. Mary’s basketball,” Coil said. “We were not expecting the following that we have now.”

The AIA down the stretch of the winter season, loosened its crowd restrictions, and now in the state tournament,with virus numbers on the decline, it has basically opened the doors wide for ticket sales to come see the games.

St. Mary’s isn’t the only school to reach audiences.

Some have used the Facebook platform to show games. Some used the National Federation of High Schools Network.

Brophy Prep established a “Live Sports” YouTube Channel so that fans who were unable to attend games in person could still see them from home. 

“YouTube does not have a paywall, so that allowed us to make the games available for fans without those fans having to pay a fee,” Brophy coach Matt Hooten said. “Our director of student activities, Pete Burr, worked on the technology side, and then members of our Brophy Broadcast Club provided commentary during most games.”

Four Brophy seniors, Augie Walters, Griffin Winter,  Nick Williams and Nick Pecora,  lead the club, which has more than a dozen members that cover every winter and spring sport at the school.

Leander, a 1982 Brophy graduate, has been training and scheduling students to cover games at every level, Hooten said.

“The hard work of our Brophy Broadcast Club has enabled not just local fans to see our games, but also Brophy alumni and fans from around the country,”  Hooten said. “The channel went live on January 20th at the start of the winter sports season, and we now have 550 regular subscribers with some of our streams getting thousands of views.”

Phoenix Sunnylope, the No. 1 team in 6A, which gave St. Mary’s its only loss of the season in the Vikings’ opener, has a contract with prepspotlight.tv to broadcast most of its varsity home games. Lower-level games had to be streamed on Sunnyslope Boys Basketball Facebook page.

“Away games were a different story,” Sunnyslope basketball coach Ray Portela said. “We had to contact each AD of the school we were playing and see what their method of streaming was.

“Some were better than others.  I thought Nfhsnetwork.com was not very reliable at all.  I had parents complaining to me on not knowing what the score was during games and that sometimes a school’s camera would skip in and out.

“The whole season during the pandemic definitely kept me on my toes in terms of constant communication with the parents in our program.  For each game, emails had to be sent out with ticketing and streaming information because different schools and districts handled things in different manners.”

Kingman basketball coach Nick Juby said his school was able to use Hudl Focus and stream live on YouTube at no cost to anyone who wanted to watch.

“The stream was great, the visiting parents were able to watch, and our parents loved how good the picture quality was and how easy it was to watch all our home games,” Juby said.

Sierra Vista Buena’s basketball season started a month later than the rest of the AIA, but ended up going 9-1 to get a 5 seed in the boys basketball 5A tournament.

Coach Tyler Molesworth said that Smith Chiropractic, a business in Sierra Vista, offered to stream the games on their Facebook page.

“We had a player from the JV team film each game,” Molesworth said. “We are grateful to him for his efforts.

“The feedback I got about the livestreams was that they were blurry and hard to see details, such as numbers. Parents didn’t have a tough time because they could find out who their kid was by the way he moved. Overall, it worked out okay. I was still able to have stats done and create game plans with video. I think next year I’ll do it different, though, so we can have a clearer picture.”

To suggest human-interest story ideas and other news, reach Obert at [email protected] or 602-316-8827. Follow him on Twitter @azc_obert.

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