Ready or not, here comes a new fall sports season

This summer marked 20 years since I made one of the biggest decisions of my life.

A little more than two months removed from graduating college, I’d been living with a cousin just outside of Cleveland, sending out my resume and clips to just about any newspaper across the country that had an opening for a sports reporter.

Most of those never got a response, but a handful did, and I ended up with three formal interviews – one in Indiana, one in Kentucky, and another on the phone with a paper in Idaho.

The first one ghosted me, the second two offered the job, and rather than trek all the way to Idaho, I opted for Kentucky. And in July of 2004, I started at the Times-Tribune in Corbin, the home of the Redhounds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’m not kidding.

A lot has happened since then, starting with my move back to New Hampshire just 15 months later.

This site was created in January of 2010, and only because I’d been laid off from the newspaper job I had then. My Dad, who first had the idea for the site long before it happened, passed away in 2011, and I got married the following year.

The biggest change for the site came in 2015, when I left my full-time job to put more effort into NH-HighSchoolSports.com. I don’t know if I’d call it the best decision I ever made, but it was definitely one that I don’t regret.

I was faced with another big decision in the final months of 2023. Over the previous eight years, I had a part-time job to go along with running the site, a fallback in case something came up, you know, like not having any high school sports for six months in 2020.

But that job came to an end when the store I was working at closed at the end of last year, and rather than look for something else, I decided it was time to see just what I could do here.

I spent the winter and spring seasons keeping things mostly status quo, but devoting that extra time to the things I normally did, and the results were encouraging. This summer, things have been very quiet around here while I’ve worked behind the scenes on what is next.

With the start of the 2024-25 sports year beginning officially on Friday, here’s a few things that will be coming up.

• The Ninth State Sports Show podcasts are back, starting next week. Kelli Braley and I will have the first field hockey podcast of 2024 for you on Monday, followed by the first football podcast with myself and Mike Lochman on Tuesday. Both shows will be weekly for the course of the fall season.
• Plans are in place to add more podcasts throughout the year as well, starting with a third weekly podcast during the fall that will feature more of a roundup style of conversation. Stay tuned.
• This fall, I’ll be adding a few features to football coverage that have already been successful with other sports. That includes a weekly coaches poll along with a preseason watch list and my own all-state teams at the end of the year. Those will also return for field hockey coverage.
• The Season will make a return this fall and I’ll be announcing which team I am following on Aug. 28. Episodes will begin the following week and run every Wednesday throughout the fall.
• While I began cutting back on some game coverage in the spring, the plan is to continue that this fall, while replacing a lot of that with bigger daily roundups and more weekly features, focusing on other aspects aside from just games.

There will be plenty more to come as the fall gets rolling along and I’m excited to get it all going.

If you are just excited as I am, and you want to help support my coverage of high school sports, there are two ways you can do that.

One is by signing up for a Sports Insider Membership, which you can do by going here. That gives you access to all the coverage on the site, no matter what sport, going back through the years and seasons as well.

The other is by being a sponsor. There are several different options no matter how you’d like to support the site. You can sponsor any, or all, of the podcasts, or the weekly coaches polls. If you just would like to do a one-time sponsorship, you could sponsor the watch list or all-state teams.

If you are interested in helping me continue some of the best high school coverage in the state, send an email to nhhighschoolsports@gmail.com or go here.

Football practices officially begin on Friday and so does the fall sports coverage. I’m looking forward to another great year and thank you for joining me for the ride.