Unleashed is ... a launch pad for the Valley's young talent

I've only been off the team for, oh, how long has it been? A year and some months, I believe. My experiences on Unleashed, I think, have influenced me greatly.

However, I've already said as much in these pages, so I won't write too long.

I remember my first Unleashed meeting, probably looking very, very young and wondering what I would make of myself during my time on the team, not knowing that I would reapply for further years nor write so much.

My younger self didn't think about the possibility that Unleashed would be a fixture of my teenage years. In fact, when I had the opportunity to become a columnist, I was excited, but yet I remember not thinking much of it. I was floating, really.

During the time I was on the team, and since I have been off, the Yakima Herald-Republic, like almost all newspapers in the United States, has gotten smaller, because "nobody reads newspapers anymore."

I sense that features like Unleashed exist in part to encourage young people to get newspaper subscriptions. To write it openly: Unleashed is intended as a commercial.

The problem with this, however, is that it seems the most avid readers of the section are of older generations.

I know that many young people do read Unleashed, and that stories and columns from it are often studied in high school English classes. But it seems that overall, the section has failed to do what was intended, simply because it could never do what was intended.

The decline of the daily is going to reach its inevitable end about 20 years from now, if not earlier.

What good, then, is Unleashed?

Just because youth pages won't save newspapers is no reason to ignore or remove them, especially one of such quality as ours. Unleashed serves a much more important purpose in that it gathers together a good sampling of the next generation of writers, artists and photographers and pushes their skills forward.

It is the launch pad for the Yakima Valley's young talent. Let's face it: There are very few cultural venues in the Valley, especially ones easily accessible to young people.

Unleashed helps fill a void.

It also builds friendships. I am especially grateful to Unleashed for introducing me to one of the best people in the world, my good friend Desiree Pebeahsy, a 2008 White Swan High School graduate.

We're both kids from the launch pad, and we both owe it to the page for the encouragement it gave us. I can only hope that others will say the same for some years to come.

-- Drew Toop, a four-year veteran of the Unleashed team and a 2007 graduate of Davis High School, attends Washington State University.

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