football tab cover photo

Any other orders? I'm headed to the cooler, anyway.

 

i'm not busting anyone's balls, or trying to, but the not pissing anyone off-offensive line philosophy is horrible, just fucking horrible.

 

You're in Texas. This won't be a problem. If you put the star player on the cover, it's not going to piss off the other teams. They want to read high school football and they will read it.

Here's a possible cover idea: pick the coach who's been there the longest, spend a day with him during training camp and kinda make it a day in the life of a coach during one of the busiest times of the year.

Put him on the cover. No need to get into which plays he's running/practicing, but if you hear him say something funny during the drill, write that.

 

the problem with a cover that uses a star player from every team in your coverage area together is just that - getting them together.

 

Why is the cover being brainstormed in a vacuum? Aside from the assembly-line, team-by-team previews, what sort of features/enterprise are budgeted for the section? You may not have the desired display space or color positions available inside to illustrate the mainplay the way it deserves to be handled, so why not take advantage of the cover position to really sell it and make it sing?

 

Two years ago, the cover for our football tab was just a football. It was a really tight picture of a football with the laces vertically in the center of the page. At the top in small words it said Podunk's football preview.
Nothing special, it was real simple and it worked since there's like 20 schools in our coverage area.
It probably wasn't the most creative idea for a tab, but it won an award for best design.
My point is it doesn't always have to be some great, outlandish idea. Sometimes simple works, so maybe try to stick with the locker idea.

 

Thanks everyone, I appreciate the ideas and help

 

Where's my OV?

 

I went to the cooler, but the only thing left was Keystone.

 

I like the empty locker idea, especially if you can get the lighting right. Maybe run it in black-and-white or a shade of umber to give it a kind of classic look.

 

I worked in a small town with five high schools and I did the "helmets in a row" cover last year. It was pretty dull. I tried to spruce it up by lining them up in a "V" on the field of our largest school's football field. I had the stands in the background. It wasn't my favorite. I've used an action shot of a running back to go with a feature story about one school's history of talented backs. I also tried the star player cover. I shot them huddled over me and our graphics person put a stormy sky with lightning in the background. I know it sounds like something from a Whitesnake video, but it looked nice.

 

I thought about the huddle idea, also, but rounding up the players from the nine different schools might be difficult, since it's basically nine small towns in the coverage area.