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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Letter from AFM

by: John Gallup
Editor and Publisher
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When I played high school football, which was well before some of our younger readers were born, the Saturday afternoon games (we had no lights) were played in front of perhaps 500 fans. We were a large suburban school in a pretty big market, but this was, after all, upstate New York – never considered a hotbed of high school football. We were lucky to get our game score included in the local paper. We never lifted weights, which is obvious from the old yearbook photos. As I recall, we won about half of our games. None of us went on to play college ball.
At the time, our relative lack of success and notoriety really didn’t matter to us. We played the game because we loved being football players. While we didn’t particularly appreciate getting only small rations of water during “double sessions” in the oppressive August heat, just about everything else that went along with being on the team was rewarding. The hitting, the infrequent great play, the occasional big win, the camaraderie, earning the respect of our coaches through hard work if not necessarily skill.
We had no idea that, in other parts of the country, high school football was being played on a massive scale. That in Texas and elsewhere games were sometimes played in front of tens of thousands. There was no ESPN, no USA Today, no Internet to inform us what was happening around the country. Just one or two college games on Saturday, two NFL games on Sunday and Sports Illustrated.
While high school football has been beyond big in some parts of the country for decades, today its popularity is a nationwide phenomenon. It’s not surprising that now you can get information on every high school team and virtually every player in the country online. But what is surprising is how television, interstate games, national rankings, player ratings and all-star games have elevated high school football to a level approaching DI and far surpassing small college football in terms of exposure and media coverage.
How did we get to this point? And what lies ahead? In this issue, in Part One of a special AFM series about how the world of high school football has become a very big business, contributing writer Steve Dorsey looks at the ways that television is shaping much of what’s happening at the elite levels of the high school game.
While most coaches would say that nationally-televised games are great exposure for schools and athletes, CBSSports.com Senior Writer Dennis Dodd argues that this type of exposure is actually overexposure for athletes too young to handle being in the spotlight. You can read his opinion in this month’s Your Take.
Next month, we’ll take a look at the national rankings of high school teams and players. Is it really necessary to have so many different polls, and how exactly do they determine how teams get ranked? How is it even humanly possible to rank every high school team in America, #1 through #14,688, as one service does.
As for my old high school squad, I can almost hear them chanting right now. “We’re number 10,864! We’re number 10,864!” If we had only known that way back when.

John Gallup
Editor & Publisher






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