CHATSWORTH : Students’ Video Tribute to Coach Wins Award

To find a subject for their award-winning video, two students from Chatsworth High School had to look no further than the baseball field at their own school.

In “Diamond Dreams,” senior Greg Kent and junior Danny Llewelyn documented the life of Chatsworth High’s baseball coach, Pete Redfern, a 1972 City of Los Angeles high school baseball Player of the Year and a former Minnesota Twin who was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident at the height of his career.

The 14-minute video won second place in the California State Student Media Festival last week out of 170 entries. Nick Sende, a Chatsworth High senior, won third place for a public service video on AIDS.

Kent has won a total of five awards this spring for three videos he produced, including a Los Angeles Unified School District Award for “Diamond Dreams” and two Los Angeles Student Film Institute Awards of Distinction for public service videos. He said a school course taught him much more than basic editing and production techniques.

“The more time you put into it, the better it gets,” said Kent, who said he worked many hours after school on “Diamond Dreams.”

The video intersperses grainy images of Redfern, seated on the field in a wheelchair, his arms folded in his lap, with old clips from Minnesota Twins’ games. Most of the video is narrated by Redfern, who describes the accident in graphic detail.

“Everything went numb,” he remembers, “I lay there face down in the water, and I could see my right arm dangling in front of me.”

Redfern explains how the tragedy helped him to recognize the importance of trying hard. “I almost died a couple of times,” he says, “Now I see my life as a God-given gift.” Richard Doran, a teacher at Chatsworth High for 14 years, started the filmmaking course seven years ago. He said that the goal of the course is not to produce award-winning videos, but to inspire students to think about social issues.

“Their background in media is action films with car chases,” Doran said. “I try to get them to think about other things.”