It’s the final calm before the high school sports season storm, also known as GHSA Dead Week.
This one is the traditional one. The other one recently added to the calendar happens late in May just after most schools dismiss for the summer.
Don’t ask me why, but the additional Dead Week seems to make the summer break go by faster. I don’t know. Whatever the case, once we’ve lit our last bottle rocket (do people still do those?) or firecracker and had our last 4th of July burger from the grill, it’s time to flip the switch for full-on 2024-25 high school sports season calendar action.
It’s coming at you fast, isn’t it? Seems like we just congratulated the Class of 2024. At the time of this article, we’re literally and exactly one month away from the first official contests of the new sports season.
I perused the schedule and it appears a Harlem at Greenbrier softball game on Thursday, Aug. 1 is the earliest contest for any team in our coverage area.
At that point, we’ll be almost exactly two weeks away from Week 1 of the 2024 high school football season. We’ll also be entertaining the first volleyball games of the season while the GHSA’s earliest date for cross country meets will be August 12.
That means once this week is over, it’ll be a full-on sprint for sports journalists to prepare preview content and size up their respective areas to provide the best possible coverage.
With that in mind, here are a few things to look for from us with regard to our sports coverage for the 2024-25 sports calendar.
A more specified coverage area
With regard to high schools, we’ll serve a total of 34 in the CSRA area.
That includes the 16 public high schools in Richmond and Columbia counties (11 in Richmond, five in Columbia), as well as six Augusta-area private schools: Alleluia Community School, Aquinas, Augusta Christian, Augusta Prep, Edmond Burke Academy and Westminster.
We’ll include five “fringe” schools from the Georgia side of the CSRA: Burke County, Lincoln County, Thomson, Warren County and Washington County, and we’ll cover seven “fringe” schools from the South Carolina side of the CSRA: Aiken, Fox Creek, Midland Valley, North Augusta, Silver Bluff, South Aiken and Thurmond.
We know there will be some CSRA schools that some of you will think we’re “missing,” but I just want to remind you that this coverage team consists of one sports staffer (me) and a team of freelancers who have other jobs and responsibilities aside from the work they do for us. Long gone are the olden days when newspapers had sometimes more than a dozen full-time journalists dedicated to sports coverage.
That said, we’ll try to be at as many games as possible, provide weekly score updates, lots of feature stories, highlights, photos and videos of action. We’ll be very active on social media, and what we can’t cover with our band of sports contributors, we’ll rely on the help of athletic directors, coaches and even fans and parents to help us fill in some gaps.
That means, we invite you to send us photos, scores, notable stats or even teams/players you think would be worth coverage. Don’t be shy with telling us about that cool story idea unique to your area school. Tag us on social media. Email me any time of any day.
You will help us reach areas that we just don’t have the bandwidth to personally reach ourselves.
Collegiate coverage
We won’t ignore the colleges in our area, starting, of course, with a strengthened effort to have more presence at Augusta University. We’ll also keep a steady stream of Georgia Bulldogs and South Carolina Gamecocks sports news on our site, and sometimes we’ll include tidbits from other schools like Georgia Tech, Georgia State or Clemson, especially if there are some local ties to observe.
While some of those stories will come through a wire services such as the Associated Press, we’re going to work as hard as we can to keep our own sports writers and photographers on the AU beat. We’ll always be on the lookout for ways to really localize our coverage of area colleges and universities.
Golf coverage
It only makes sense to feature a good stream of golf news that matters in The Augusta Press, right? After all, we are the home of arguably the greatest and most unique professional golf experience in the world.
We’ll work to keep you abreast of the latest happenings in and around the sport that means so much to our city. And, with the addition of a couple of solid golf freelance writers, we’ll start telling more stories about the CSRA’s burgeoning amateur golf scene.
Other odds and ends
I like to get creative with the way I approach sports coverage. So you’re going to see a few new things rolling out from us over the course of the new school sports calendar, including a fresh approach to our football preview publication. We’ll talk more about that a little later.
Don’t be surprised to see us try some different approaches and some innovative ways to try and get more eyes on our sports content. Some will work great. Others, not so much. But we’re going to throw a few things to the wall to see what sticks, then perfect to make it better.
We know high school sports in the Augusta/CSRA area is what butters our bread. But we’ll also keep you in the know of who the best-of-the-best high school athletes are across Georgia and South Carolina.
We’ll provide smart takes and more in-depth stories that show you why that big national story everyone’s talking about could have more impact on your own backyard than you may believe. We’ll be trying more things in multimedia coverage as well.
Can you tell that I’m excited?
As always, we thank those of you who take time to read our product, and we look forward to bringing you the most consistent and comprehensive sports coverage we possibly can for an area that deserves it.
Also as always, please give us your feedback, ideas and things you’d like to see more of. We want it and will do our best to adhere to it.
In the meantime, enjoy your 4th of July holiday and the final calm before the storm. As we hit the ground running in full force next week, don’t be too shy to say “hello” to someone you see donning that August Press press pass.
We’ll see you at the game!
Gabriel Stovall is the sports editor for The Augusta Press. He can be reached via email at Gabriel@theaugustapress.com or on X and Instagram: @GabrielCStovall. Follow The Augusta Press’ sports coverage on X at @AugPressSports and our “AugustaPressSports” Facebook page.
