The athletics department at Omaha North High School has been changing and evolving over the years.
Due to the lack of a stadium at North, all home football games are hosted at Omaha Northwest High School’s Kinnick Stadium. To view the details of a football game, a traditional Light Emitting Diode (LED) football scoreboard is a common option. The traditional scoreboard displays information regarding the current game, such as the home and guest score, as well as their name, game time, quarter digits and downs according to Sports Venue Calculator.
For Omaha Public Schools (OPS), particularly Northwest High School and Bryan High School, their outdoor scoreboards have begun to stop working because they were outdated and old.
“Bryans scoreboard, I know it stopped working, I think all of last fall [2023], and they had to use a portable scoreboard for their football games,” said John Hankel, curriculum specialist for Music, Art, Career and Tech Education and assistant athletic director.
During the first few weeks of April 2024, new scoreboards for all Omaha Public Schools, as well as North, were installed by a company called Digital Scoreboards LLC and Strive.
Each school received two indoor scoreboards for their main gym and the schools with stadiums received two outdoor scoreboards. The total cost of all the boards for OPS, indoor and outdoor, was likely around $4,000,000, according to Hankel.
The new scoreboards, in both the Multi-Purpose Center (MPC) at Omaha North and the stadium at Northwest High School, are adding new excitement among North students and staff. The boards in the MPC will be used for basketball, wrestling and volleyball, while the scoreboards at the Northwest stadium will be used for football.
“Our goal is… to have some starting lineup videos… special presentations for senior night, halftime statistics… maybe some things for assembly’s and pep rallies,” said Hankel regarding the use of the boards.
In order to enhance the abilities of the scoreboards, the new boards are able to showcase individual players’ statistics, live video, team scores and pregame and halftime advertisements depending on the chosen set-up. Previously, the scoreboards were only able to show the time and the score.
“It is basically like a TV up there,” said Hankel.
The current scoreboards are expected to have a lifespan of ten to fifteen years. The software for the videoboards will likely be updated and possibly improved over that time period.
Randall Henderson and Natalie Runyon have been working on the graphics and making the videos that will be displayed on the boards.
“We had talked to some of the volleyball players and we’re just starting to work with some of the basketball players, their kind of excited to see… their pictures up there, and videos,” said Hankel.
As of November 2024, Hankel and his team are working on figuring out how to display the starting lineup, but they understand that it is a learning process and may take some time.
