High School Players of the Year

Holy crap! 7 schools, 5 players of the year (in some form)??
First and second team, offense and defense, plus honorable mention?
Does that cover every kid who put on a uniform?

 

I've made linemen the POY, when;

1) their teams were absolutely dominant;

2) there was pretty solid unanimity among area coaches the kid was really the most important player on the team; and

3) I had seen with my own eyes that the kid was absolutely dominant on the line (OL, he clears out his side of the line like a bulldozer; DL, he crushes everything on his side of the line, again, like a bulldozer).

4) If he's getting full-ride offers from big-time schools, THAT HELPS, but it is not really a determining factor. We are not picking the guys who may be great college players in the future; we are picking guys who had great HS seasons, this year.

If all that is true, why not??

If it's not true, more than likely, a key offensive skill player will be your POY.

The challenge with picking a lineman as POY is you will not have a lot of gaudy stats to back it up (except maybe tackles or sacks), so you better put together a lot of testimonal evidence that that cat is really a baaaaadd MF -- or you better shut your mouth.

 

Offensive lineman Andre Smith was Mr. Football in Alabama last year.

 

Unless he's an Orlando Pace type of lineman, no friggin way. Wash your hands of this one, cause this all-area team sounds like it's going to be a joke.

 

Postseason begins the first weekend in November. Teams never make it past the third round (weekend before Thanksgiving).

It wasn't fun turning it around this year. We were down to two full-time people and our prep hoops preview (18 pages) and football wrap came out two days apart.

 

Not disagreeing, but that's the way it's always been done, apparently. We award just one Sophomore of the Year in every sport (which can get really bad, there are only three candidates for girls' cross country) but yet we award two for football.

And I agree that it is a lot of kids. But for the second team and honorable mention, we don't do much at all (basically list them in agate format). If it means typing in a couple of extra names, no biggie.

Our paper is under the impression that more names in the paper sells more, that's why they want us to improve our recreational sports/outdoors coverage quite a bit in 2007.

 

kudos to you for doing all that. we just do two teams (one big schools and one small schools) in a graphic, then a story on player of the year.

oh, and for the rec stuff. pick a day to run it and make all the area recreation depts. submit the info for it. then you find a part-timer to get it in. its not the worst, if you put it on community as much as possible.