The Jackson Post has been in existence for 10 months, and one question we’re regularly asked is if we will cover middle school sports.
The honest answer is we want to, but we’re not sure if we can right now.
The reason for that is because Brandon Shields is currently serving as our sports editor. But he’s also our managing editor, county commission reporter, education reporter and newsroom clerk. He’s also been known to make single copy deliveries on those occasions of when he knows of a need when a subscriber didn’t get a paper and he’s able to bring a copy to the house.
When we hire a dedicated sports writer, the plan is for that sports writer to focus mainly on high school sports, know what’s going on with our local college sports and be in attendance as much as possible on their campuses, whatever baseball team is in the Jackson Baseball Stadium that particular year (it looks like the Rockabillys for the foreseeable future) and then add middle school and youth sports.
That doesn’t mean middle school and youth sports will get as much coverage as high school sports, but they’ll get mentions in articles and area results.
So the official answer to the question of whether or not we will cover middle school sports is “no … until we hire a sports writer.”
We still don’t have a sports writer yet, but Brandon feels kind of bad about missing out on middle school and youth sports.
So the question he’s tried to figure out is how does he balance getting the younger generation of sports and athletes in the pages of The Post and still continue to get regular amounts of sleep throughout the week?
Then reader Tyler Porter sent an e-mail with a question: Could he send information from his child’s middle school games? And if he did, would we run it.
The answer was apparently “no” because I didn’t run it initially. But today, that no becomes a yes. Because while there may not be a couple thousand people at a middle school football game, those players deserve a chance for their name to be in the paper too and their parents should get the opportunity to make scrapbooks like I’ve been told some of the high school parents are doing now for their kids.
So middle school, youth, travel, senior softball, local golf club member tournaments … send the information to brandon@jacksonpost.news, and we’ll get it in print and online somehow.
Here’s an example of what we’re looking for from Tyler Porter’s stat submissions that you can send:
TCA 6, Huntingdon 0
Goals: T – Mary Grace Cleek 2, Hannah Cleek 1, Farrah Carson 1, Aniston Harwell 1, Tatum Farmer 1 goal.
TCA 3, Paris Inman 0
Goals: T – Abby Porter 2, Aniston Harwell 1
TCA 4, St Mary’s 0
Goals: T – Farrah Carson 1, Abby Porter 1, Mary Grace Cleek 1, Ellie Nethery 1
TCA 9, JCS 0
Goals: Aniston Harwell 3, Tatum Farmer 1, Mary Grace Cleek 1, Abby Porter 1, Farrah Carson 1, Amelia Harwell 1, Kylee Jane Loyd 1
To the middle school parents and coaches who are willing and able to help out with this coverage, thank you for your efforts. They’re very much appreciated. And thank you for being willing to help us out with this.
Because Brandon needs as much time as possible to put all this together, he will collect game stat submissions by Sunday afternoon each week for the previous calendar week. If you’re not able to get stats in by Sunday, that’s OK. Go ahead and submit them on Monday, and we’ll run them the following week.
We want to get as many names in our publication of people in Madison County, because we’re serving our purpose to Jackson and Madison County when it’s your names we’re putting in here.
The Jackson Post’s opinion/editorial page is meant to help launch public discussion of local issues or allow local people to discuss national or statewide issues. Publication of a column is not an endorsement of that column by The Post, its owners or any of its advertisers or employees. To join the discussion, send a guest column or letter to the editor to brandon@jacksonpost.news. Submissions for a specific week’s print edition need to be sent by Monday night. Sending does not guarantee publication that week as that is based on space availability.
