Summer Endeavors: Sportscasts, Product Tests and Legislative Quests
By Dylan Howlett
9-minute read
We have learned these past few years — through competitive rock climbing and archaeological digs, water-quality research and debate national championships, automotive design internships and international jump rope competitions — that Durham Academy students don’t see summer as a time of pure idling. It is a time of action, of growth, of experiences moral, happy and productive.
The summer of 2026 was no different, both for current students and alumni. This year’s first of two installments showcasing the mission-driven summer life highlights a trio of current and former Cavaliers who chased their dreams in front of the camera, in an engineering lab and in the halls of legislative power.
AVERY HOUSER ’27
The Sports Broadcasting Camp | Seton Hall University | New Jersey
It was two years ago, during the spring of her 10th grade year at the Upper School, when Avery Houser ’27 stumbled upon her new obsession: professional ice hockey. Her classmate and friend, Anne Hoberg ’27, rooted for the Carolina Hurricanes and thought Houser might enjoy watching a playoff game on TV. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Houser said. The physicality of the combatants. The speed of the skaters. The camaraderie of the players seated beside each other on their respective benches. Houser was captivated.
She would, in short order, go from casual watcher to insatiable fanatic. Her favorite National Hockey League player is Igor Shesterkin, a goaltender for the New York Rangers. She met Stormy, the Hurricanes’ mascot, at a Childish Gambino concert. Her first jersey was that of Andrei Svechnikov, a talented forward who wears No. 37 for the Hurricanes. She maintains a collection of seven autographed Hurricanes pucks in her Durham bedroom. And after the Canes won the Stanley Cup in June for the first time in 20 years, Houser joined several of her DA friends — and more than 150,000 other Caniacs — at the championship parade in downtown Raleigh.
Her growing love for sports — Houser also found herself watching golf and NASCAR events this summer — has coincided with a growing appreciation for journalism and storytelling. She has long considered herself a student and learner who gravitates toward STEM. But Houser’s sports talk with her friends and family became so incessant, and so knowledgeable, that her mom, Marisa, prodded her to do something that married her newfound passions.
One day during Houser’s junior year, Marisa was searching online for sports journalism-related summer experiences when she found The Sports Broadcasting Camp, the nation’s longest-running sportscasting camp — it celebrated its 25th year in 2026 — that exposes aspiring broadcasters aged 10–19 to the intricacies of industry jobs on both sides of the camera. Houser was intrigued. But the application deadline had already passed, and she blanched after she pored over the camp’s website and found a rather conspicuous absence of female campers in its photos and videos. Marisa Houser called Dave Popkin, the camp’s director and a longtime sportscaster, and explained both conundrums. Popkin was emphatic. They had a seat for Houser if she wanted one. There would be other girls in attendance. And she’d start learning broadcast skills that most students don’t pick up until they’re undergrads.
Houser took the seat. She wouldn’t regret it.
“I can’t thank [Popkin] enough,” she said in a conversation about a month after she attended the camp. “I feel like I’ve learned so many skills, and my sense of self has even changed. I feel a lot more confident in the things that give me passion.”
During the last week of July, Houser checked into a New York City hotel with her fellow campers. They commuted together by train to Seton Hall University, the host of the camp, in South Orange, New Jersey, about 15 miles from midtown Manhattan. She became fast friends with Stella, a fellow hockey fan from New York City. Out of 137 campers, they were two of only nine girls. But that distinction landed those nine campers a private audience with Emily Kaplan, an NHL reporter for ESPN who also happens to be Houser’s “absolute idol.” Kaplan impressed upon the campers the importance of supporting other women in a male-dominated industry — as many as 80% of sports reporters are men, according to available statistics — and projecting enough confidence to show they belong in the business. “She wants girls to learn and to be inspired by her,” Houser said. “She wants us to succeed.”
Her hands-on experience at the camp ran the proverbial broadcasting gamut. She practiced hosting a radio talk show, delivering play-by-play commentary, calling out camera shots in a production truck as an associate director would. She interviewed a Seton Hall women’s basketball player. She wrote and delivered a mock breaking news script about a hypothetical season-ending injury to MLB superstar Shohei Ohtani. And she found that her voracious reading habits prepared her well for reading from a teleprompter.
The week in New Jersey affirmed what Houser and her mom have suspected since she became enamored with hockey two short years ago: She is happiest when — and she is exceptionally gifted at — telling the stories of games and the people who play them.
“I just feel like a part of myself really comes to life,” Houser said.
ALEXANDRIA PARKER ’27
410 Medical | Durham
One day during her 11th grade year, Alexandria Parker ’27 was scrolling through her email when she landed on a message to the entire Upper School student body from Dr. Harry Thomas. The assistant dean of college counseling revealed that Andrew Lane ’03 was looking for a summer intern. Lane is the vice president of research and development at 410 Medical, a Durham-based medical device company dedicated to improving care for critically ill patients. That mission spoke to Parker’s sensibilities: She once served as a caregiver for a family member with myositis, a rare autoimmune disorder, and she spoke alongside her mother and grandmother of her family’s experience with the disease at The Myositis Association’s 2025 International Annual Patient Conference in Dallas.
Parker applied for the internship. The Upper School’s Academic Review Board would ultimately forward fewer than five applicants to Lane, and Parker was one of them. She ultimately landed an in-person interview for a role with the research and development team in the company’s lab, and she spoke with a pair of product development engineers, Joseph Tanas and Christian Nightengale. Parker smiled to herself as she arrived at the company’s headquarters in Research Triangle Park and noted the address: Alexander Drive. This is my place to be, Parker thought.
It was, indeed. Parker heard back in less than a day with a formal offer for a role that would stretch from the last week of June to the last week of July. There was one slight complication: The day after she received her 410 Medical offer, Parker also secured a position as a counselor at Morehead Planetarium’s Summer Science Camps on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. She had once been a planetarium camper herself — she learned later in the summer, coincidentally, that Tanas had been a Morehead camp counselor during Parker’s first year as a camper — and she loved nothing more than the idea of inspiring the Triangle’s next generation of scientists. Parker dreaded having to choose between two fulfilling opportunities. She wouldn’t have to: The part-time nature of her internship schedule only required Parker to be onsite until noon. Around lunchtime, Parker would scurry from RTP — often while scarfing down lunch in her car — and work at Morehead during the afternoons.
The hustle was worth it. Parker became 410 Medical’s first high school intern, a distinction that was as affirming as it was daunting. All of her fellow interns were college-aged. All of her supervisors were accomplished professionals. “I did feel a lot of imposter syndrome,” Parker said. “Everyone here either has degrees or is in the process of getting their degrees. They’ve been working in the field for many, many years — and I’m a high schooler who has never taken a specialized biomedical engineering class.”
The company’s most popular and common device is the LifeFlow PLUS, a syringe that acts as a rapid infuser of blood and saline in critical situations; hundreds of hospitals and EMTs nationwide already use it. Parker’s internship, however, focused on the development of a confidential product — she signed a nondisclosure agreement with 410 Medical that precludes her from divulging specifics until it reaches the market — and conducting rigorous testing, the results of which 410 Medical will eventually send to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as part of the device’s formal approval process. Her day-to-day work primarily involved saline testing, though she also performed modifications with power tools and researched the most effective methods for a device to notify a patient that their pump has malfunctioned and requires repair. She attended weekly department meetings during which Lane shared personal testimonials of LifeFlow’s impact on real patients. She toured the company’s manufacturing site in Youngsville, about a half-hour drive northeast of Raleigh. Multiple times, she met with 410 Medical’s co-founder, Dr. Mark Piehl, a pediatric intensive care physician.
Parker filed reports for her research and testing. She leaned on the research skills she honed in ADV Research and ADV Thesis, and she received feedback — overwhelmingly positive, sometimes constructive — on formatting and messaging. That exercise only reinforced how much she relishes communication, Parker said. At the end of her six weeks, 410 Medical asked its interns to present to more than 40 local and remote employees about their experience with the company. Parker volunteered to go first. She synthesized her role on the research and development team and her contributions to product testing, and she spoke, too, of her future plans — her intent to double major in biology and philosophy, her aspirations for working in emergency medicine. It affirmed, in many ways, why Parker leapt at the opportunity to work for a company that had never before hired a high schooler.
“I’m such a proponent of trying,” Parker said during an interview in the Upper School quad about a month after her internship concluded. “The philosophy I live by is, ‘Try everything you possibly can, even if you think you might not like it.’ I feel like that’s even more of a reason to try it because you never know. The whole process teaches more about yourself.
“So whenever someone has an opportunity for me, even if I have no idea what they’re talking about, I think, ‘Sign me up. Let’s do it.’ How else am I supposed to learn?”
CONNOR ENNIS ’24
Legislative Intern, Office of N.C. Sen. Dan Blue | Raleigh
Connor Ennis ’24 yearns for a balance between idealism and pragmatism. Not long after he enrolled at DA in 10th grade, Ennis discovered his skillset — and interests — were best suited to writing, public speaking and confronting real-world problems. He would become a fixture on the Upper School’s student Sustainability Committee — and he was just as likely to play an indispensable part in overhauling DA’s recycling and composting programs as he was to dive into a campus dumpster to properly sort waste. “I felt doing things like that going forward would just be a dream come true,” Ennis said in a recent Zoom interview. “Get to make a difference. Get to challenge myself. Get to grow. Get to see the impact, and feel fulfilled with what I’m doing.”
That compelled him to pursue a public policy major at Duke University. The plan was simple: Ennis would become increasingly comfortable with crafting sustainability-minded memos and solutions, and he would eventually work in tandem with local and state governments to effect change. But the 2024 presidential election, and its repercussions for environmentalism, jolted Ennis. In one of his Duke public policy classes, he first learned about the “three streams model” of politics: the problem stream, in which activists and advocates raise awareness around an issue; the policy stream, in which Ennis originally fancied himself as a contributor of memos and research that shaped systemic remedies; and the politics stream, in which representatives and public officials determine the fate of said issues. “I started to realize no matter how big of a problem it was, or how passionate the activists and advocates were, or how ingenious the policy or technical solutions were, nothing’s going to happen without the political capital — someone who’s willing to say, ‘Yes, I’ll go to bat for this in the arenas of power, in the halls of power,’” Ennis said. The epiphany inspired him to coin a rather instructive creed in a public policy paper that he wrote during the spring semester of his first year at Duke: I need to live with my feet on the ground but my eyes toward the stars.
During the summer between Ennis’ first and second years at Duke, his feet led him to the North Carolina coastal town of Beaufort, where he served as a student volunteer with the town’s government. He was stationed at the Duke University Marine Lab, a setting that gave him an unmistakable sense of “summer camp with a side of public policy.” Beaufort had planned to tear up a downtown parking lot for the purpose of installing an underground fuel tank. But it hadn’t decided what to do after the tank had been installed. Should it become a parking lot once more? Something else? Ennis and a fellow undergraduate volunteer aggregated data from community surveys, conducted their own research and eventually presented several urban planning concepts to three local government committees. In the summer of 2026, about a year after his three-month volunteer service, Ennis learned Beaufort had chosen to turn the lot into a public park. It was another fulfilling moment, he said, of learning what happens when you place your finger on the needle.
He would try to do the same this past summer as a legislative intern in the office of state Sen. Dan Blue, a longtime member of the North Carolina Legislature whose district includes the state capitol and southeastern Wake County. Ennis contributed policy and legislation research. He attended Senate sessions and kept staff and constituents informed of updates from Blue’s office. That was the pragmatic work. He saw, too, the third stream in action: Ennis had been tracking a bill in the Agriculture, Energy, and Environment Senate Standing Committee that would prevent municipalities from setting parking minimums for new housing or new construction. It had bipartisan support. But the committee boasted a powerful coastal senator who pushed for an exemption for all counties designated as “coastal” to maximize parking for tourism. The exemption applied to about a third of the state’s geographic footprint, and it ultimately passed.
But there was also the sort of stargazing idealism that inspired Ennis to study public policy. The town of Zebulon, which falls under Blue’s district, is home to Gill Street Park, which was built atop a preregulated landfill. The park’s soil and ground has, in time, become contaminated with lead, arsenic and other toxic metals, all of which endanger the health of parkgoers and residents. Blue’s chief of staff, Fred Aikens, connected Ennis with Zebulon’s town manager, and — after some research and fact-finding — Ennis walked the town manager through potential solutions and associated pricetags. Aikens was pleased. He told Ennis in late May that he would take the proposal to the state senator who oversees environmental appropriations. In early July, after the state Legislature passed its first full state budget in two years, Ennis feverishly scanned the budget for evidence of his proposal. He found it in the form of a nondescript $450,000 grant awarded to Zebulon, which Aikens said would cover costs associated with decontaminating Gill Street Park. “That,” Ennis said, “was a very fulfilling moment for me.”
So, too, was his final day in the senator’s office. Ennis was packing up and getting ready to drive back to Durham when a father and his daughter knocked on the door. The man was a radiological technician from Ethiopia who now lives in Blue’s district. He introduced himself and told Ennis that he was attempting to move his mother from Ethiopia to the United States. The U.S. State Department had rejected her application on the grounds of her potential to become a charge of the state and to drain taxpayer resources. The man handed Ennis a letter that detailed the very opposite: He and his wife both held stable, well-paying jobs that would enable them to provide for his mother. Could Sen. Blue, the man wondered, do something about this?
Ennis passed along the message and once again encountered the potential barrenness of the policy stream: There was nothing the senator’s office could do to reverse State Department protocols. But he was floored by this demonstration of civic engagement, of a constituent seeking out their elected representative in the hopes of bettering their circumstances and those of their family.
It was a resounding reminder of the paradoxical beauty of planted feet and skyward eyes.
“I want to make my voice heard, and the voices of people who also care about our energy and our environment and our planet and our conversation,” Ennis said.
“I want their voices to be heard. I want to enter the arena, fight that fight, and be able to put my finger on the needle myself.”