KYMA’s Sunrise team says goodbye to April Hettinger
April signs off of Sunrise, temporarily joins the Evening Edition on KYMA
YUMA, Ariz. (KYMA, KECY) - After joining Sunrise last fall, April Hettinger said goodbye to the morning show on Friday and stepped off the set for the final time.
April was a very special addition to the morning show, bringing the desert southwest the morning scoop after spending her first year-and-a-half as a weekday reporter and weekend anchor.
Although it was her last day on Sunrise, it is not a final goodbye just yet.
April will be moving to the Evening Edition on Monday with Adonis Albright to temporarily fill in for Jenny Day - who left KYMA last week.
Despite having to drastically change her schedule from dayside to the morning, she reflected on how the transition was not bad.
"The transition was pretty easy because I already had experience with producing," she said. "It was more of the back-to-back newscasts that we have. One on NBC and the other one on Fox. It's very fast paced and I had to learn how to adapt to that."
On top of working diligently in the newsroom, she also took on the challenge of completing her Master's Degree while working - graduating in Digital Audience Strategies from Arizona State University in December.
But that wasn't all.
She was also recognized last summer for her hard work reporting on agriculture across the desert southwest in her weekly Home Grown segments, receiving the TV Media Award from the Yuma County Farm Bureau.
All of this leading to her time on Sunrise where laughs and a long list of memorable moments were not hard to come by.
And that's something she reflected on in her final day.
"I will really miss coming to work and getting free range of the newsroom in the morning. We could yell things to each other across the room. We all have fun here," she said. "My favorite experience was when Cole Johnson was doing our morning weather forecast and some birds decided to make a surprise appearance. We could not stop laughing. Even during commercial breaks, it was hard to pull it together."
That being just one of the memorable moments that April was able to share and present to the people of the desert southwest.
Everyone at News 11 says thank you to April and wishes her the best.
The goodbye message and final moment of April's last show can be seen on the YouTube link at the top.
