The Athletic keeps growing .......

I would guess most of the high school coverage would be less about covering random high schools and more about doing things like the big AAU tournament stuff that came through Disney at the end of the July or those other big basketball/football showcases where they can write a feature on a top guy for the college verticals.

And in a city like Houston it could also work on a local level, especially during prep football season.

 

The ESPN Boston guys probably offered the best high school sports coverage around here. I don’t see high school sports as a big traffic or engagement driver. You’ll go and read about your kid’s team, maybe another team in the conference, but you’re not going to read a game story or run-of-the-mill feature about a high school team 40 minutes away.

 

I'll bail . . . as soon as I can find a landing that isn't Wile E. Coyote-esque.

When I first started in the business, our shop subscribed to two dozen of the nation's largest newspapers, and we would sign up for which one we wanted each month. This month I get the Philadelphia Inquirer delivered to my mailbox every day. Next month I'll get the L.A. Times. It was glorious to a 22-year-old newbie in 1983.

 

Id say the Herald’s better but its neither here or there...

The Athletic, if it tried, wouldnt be able to do it significantly better than espn boston, if they could even do it as well. So if it couldnt work there I dont think itll work at all

 

I feel like in some ways, The Athletic and the ESPN regional sites targeted different segments of the fan bases.

ESPN is a national brand, so it makes sense that they'd target a national audience of fans of that market's teams. While The Athletic doesn't ignore those folks, they also seem to do deeper analysis on players that will probably appeal more to the local fan base which is watching the teams game in and game out and already hearing team updates from other sources. In that sense, high school sports coverage might have a better chance of success. Red Sox fans in California might not care about the local prep sports scene in Massachusetts, but folks in Amherst might.

 

I know it's always been the case, but I felt this mentality that the only thing that matters is where the best player is going to college and how he's performing intensified over the past five years or so. When I first started writing preps just 20 years ago, people still cared how the teams in their area did. Now, even in a football-obsessed place like Ohio, nobody actually cares about the results outside of a five-mile radius of the school. It's just a matter of seeing the best player win enough in the playoffs to get them to state so everyone can see them on that stage.

We used to be able to do a preview tab and people would just be glowing over how comprehensive it was, how it helped them watch the game over the course of a season. Now they just want a feature on the kid that's going to the Big Ten school.

I feel like it's really gotten worse. And heaven forbid if you have have no DI recruits but win lots of games. You may as well not exist as a program.

I'll come back from a great game that went to double overtime and the first question will be: "So how did the (insert Big Ten linebacker's name) look?"

I'm not dumb. High school football has always been that way to an extent. But now its just so baldly obvious.

 

With a few exceptions, most markets with other stuff going on (pros and/or major colleges) don't have enough interest in high schools to justify the coverage papers used to give them.

A really good human interest piece, signing day and stuff on big-time recruits and a few other things might get some eyeballs, but run-of-the-mill prep coverage doesn't get read. Maybe Dallas would find it worth it to have a high school football writer, but I can't imagine it paying off in most markets.

 

Not for nothing, the former high school editor of ESPNBoston, who's now at USA Today, tweeted this the other day...

 

Its interesting in that the Celtics were tanking before ESPN Boston shut down so I wonder if high schools would be third now if they were still around.

Also potentially unique to Boston, there are no college sports to speak of taking any attention at all. No one cares about BC.

 

Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that.

 

It is truly not appreciated how much labor is required for preps. You don't have a media staff providing accurate rosters, schedules or practice times - you have to hunt that stuff down for yourself. Generally there is no other source for the information you seek, you can't track down some rumor from another outlet if there isn't another outlet interested in preps. You generally have a two or three hour "window" to observe teams (all of them) practicing when they aren't in school. And then you multiply this by three or four sports - boys and girls - depending on the season.

 

When we expanded our prep website a few years ago, we hired a kid out of college as a part-timer to cover an area we hadn't dealt with before. He was used to covering college games for his school paper and getting info from the sports information department. I sat down with him to explain what we were looking for, etc. He told me he was planning to contact athletic directors to get on their mailing lists for information. He seemed stunned when I told him no such thing exists in our area. To get information, he had to work the phones or, better yet, be there.