So we'll talk a little high school football, past and present...and future.
About the name, I suppose its not that imaginative, but my creative side has gone to sleep. Don Henley's 'Down at the Sunset Grille' is one of my favorites, and I spend some time at Sunset Beach (hence the name).
(Note - The following is lengthy background about who I am. If you want to know how I came to be involved in high school football, read on. Otherwise, maybe you should wait for the next blog entry :)
Not to give you my resume, but as a little background, I am a former sports journalist. I've covered college basketball, NASCAR...you name it. But I've always had a special place in my heart for high school football.
It's all my Dad's fault. Dad passed away in 1998, but from 1957-1980 he was a high school football referee, a booking agent, and the guy who generally took care of making sure the Boys Club and middle schools had officials at their games. Dad called several state title games over the years, and worked mainly in the Triad and sometimes west of Charlotte and in the Sandhills. We grew up in Concord. I am a Spider ('78), like my Dad before me (Class of '49). But along the way, I think developed an understanding and respect for good football programs and coaches, and officials, which helped me later on.
When I was a kid, in the late 1960's, Dad let me tag along with him and his buddies to the games they called. I learned early about Parkland and Homer Thompson's teams, and Grimsley versus Page, that it was dangerous to leave after a close loss at Thomasville, and that West Montgomery and East Montgomery liked to fight after their game.
So when I got a chance to cover high school football for the hometown paper while at college, I jumped at the chance. I decided that with the knowledge of the schools I had, I could cover the western part of the state. "Best of the West' newsletter was born in 1982 in my apartment in Boone, and I published that in 1982-83 and sent it to media and coaches I knew. After graduation I became part of the sports staff (which is to say 2 people) of the paper. I wrote a weekly column (oddly, much of it was about high school sports), covered Davidson basketball and NASCAR. And a lot of high school football. I got to see a lot of the 1984 AL Brown Wonders wun the title game up close, and was on their sidelines everyt playoff game, including that cold night against Tarboro.
By 1985, I decided I'd better use my degree, so I left for another line of work and moved to Raleigh. But by 1986, I found myself going to high school games and decided I might try another newsletter...this time statewide, from the state capitol. Prepscene (later Tar Heel Prep) was very successful from its outset in October 1986, and I decided to create a power rating system that I continued to refine and use until I stopped publishing in 1999. I sat through countless realignment committee meetings because I found the process interesting, helped bail out one school from being misclassified (with the help of Bruce Hardin)
Along the way were countless sports talk radio shows, a three-year stint with a high school football review segment on the UNC football pregame show, etc. I did some unofficial scouting for a few colleges, I did scouting reports for some of my coaching subsribers. Most of my subscribers were coaches (high school anbd collegiate) and officials, but I kept the subscriptions managable for my own sanity's sake - rarely did I have over 150. The money was minimal and barely covered my costs...but it was fun. I did use a lot of gasoline from 1986-1999, travelling the state every Friday night ("From Waynbesville to Wilmington" was our motto). Toward the end I only covered 3A and 4A schools, and by 1999, job promotions (and in the early 90's, graduate school) made it impossible to keep up, so the last issue of Tar Heel Prep rolled out in December 1999. It was a 20th century thing :)
And a few years ago I found this interesting high school sports site...
There you go, more than you ever wanted to know. Not that this is intended to give me some special 'guru' status. I've been away from it for years, and I always said, whenever someone would call me a guru, that 'anyone who can predict how 16 and 17 year olds will perform on a given Friday is not a guru but an idiot.' Wish I could take credit for the quote, but it came from a coach.