How's your high school football season going?

One of the crazy, crazy days when I was at USA Today was trying to round up all the Thanksgiving scores for that Friday paper. Long before Al Gore invented the Internets.

 

Three of my four remaining teams lost last night (including a 1-seed playing at home), so it's almost basketball season for me.

 

Virginia did a massive reorganization of how schools are aligned this year. One of the byproducts is there are 32 teams in each of 6 classes in the playoffs, which means 192 of the 314 or so schools made the playoffs. Of course, that produced some scores last night such as 57-0, 56-7, 62-20 and 56-0 (which was 56-0 at halftime and, after the first quarter, quarter lengths were cut to 8 minutes and presumably the second half was played with a running clock).

There are 5 rounds of playoffs, which means we have 4 weeks to go. And I think all the sub.-500 teams that played Friday night are gone. It would help if the VHSL would cut back one round of playoffs and keep some of the teams that are going to get blown out in the first round out the playoffs completely.

Virginia plays its championship games at 3 sites: 6A and 5A are at the University of Virginia, 4A and 3A are at Liberty University and 2A and 1A are in Salem. I love covering championship game at UVA or Lane Stadium in Blacksburg when there are, at best, 5,000 people in a 65,000-seat stadium. Makes for a great atmosphere ... not!

 

Three of our six teams out in the first week (well, to be fair, one was an 8-man team in a bowl). All the volleyball teams out too, plus down to one water polo team.

 

Montana state volleyball finished its three-day, all-class tournament that Bozeman hosts. I loathe state volleyball weekend - typing between 30 and 50 box scores, maybe more, over three days. Oh, and I now have back-to-back title games - next Friday (Class AA, largest class) and Class C 8-man on Saturday.
But then comes a two-week break before basketball.
Speaking of which - I really, as noted, want to blow out coverage again - the AA team could be perfect for the second time in four years. Aside from a feature a day (player profiles) what other things could be done graphically or in coverage? Taking all ideas. I'm still iffy on doing a compare/contrast of 2010 vs. 2013 teams.

 

The compare/contrast to a previous champ can work. A few years ago I had a hs baseball team win state for the second time in four years. There were three sets of brothers where big brother was on the previous champ and little brother was on that year's team. That made for a good feature.
Other than that you should see if you can get starters for each team and run that as part of a preview pkg. I'm sure you've been doing features on these guys all year so you may be scraping the bottom of the barrel, but the second string place kicker or the ball boy or the kid who runs out and grabs the tee after kickoffs might make for a good feature

 

Heading to the state quarterfinals, we're down to nine teams across six classes.
That's a very manageable number for us.

And there's one private-school association team in a championship game on Saturday.

 

Typically, if you have a good team that gets all the way to the championship game, you've probably done all of the best story angles by now. I like the idea of a big gameday spread: rosters, results, stats, position by position analysis. Maybe some sort of historical piece somewhere that week.

But with most championship teams I've had I was rapidly running out of good story ideas by then.

 

We're down to three teams, our two biggest schools and one mid-class school with a ton of tradition as we go into the quarters. Very manageable except that the local college team is in the playoffs. So there's that.

 

I'm curious as to which state has the most classifications (I believe there have been threads about this, but I can't find them)? I'm in Minnesota and we have seven for football, which boggles my mind. Also, every team makes the playoffs. To that end, we didn't even cover a game for the first round of section playoffs. All the best teams — the 1 seeds playing 8 seeds — were going to win by 40.

 

The large schools don't draw more than that? Hell, I've covered regular-season games with quite a few more than that. When I made the argument for central sites and multiple championship games, it was with the assumption that the larger schools would comprise about 70-80 percent of the gate and smaller schools the rest.

If the state's biggest schools are only going to draw 5,000 combined for the title game, then, yeah, I wouldn't argue so much for a big stadium.

 

All three football teams left in the postseason bit the dust Friday. Saturday was the Section girls water polo championship and next Saturday is state cross country, but we can just comb the agate for that, since we have very few runners out of the county.

Alas, the first basketball game of the season is Monday, with full nonconference mode starting the week after Thanksgiving.