Hammond's Michael Tyler laying out for the TD catch in the SCISA AAAA title game.

SCHSL Commissioner -Dr Jerome Singleton

Offensive Linemen, HSSR Media Day 2024

Crestwood's Javion Martin, QB - 2023 Shrine Bowl

HSSR Forced To Raise Sponsor Ad Rates For First Time In 21 Years Starting August 1st Moncks Corner — It has been 21 years since “The High School Sports Report” has had a price increase on our sponsor ads, school coverage support, and even on a yearly subscription to the only statewide publication in South Carolina covering high school sports on a full-time basis. At some point, in these inflationary times we are living in, reality sets in. So, on August, 1 st the HSSR will be forced to adjust sponsor ad rates, subscription rates, and year- round coverage cost for athletic programs we are now covering on a year-round basis, and for any new schools who wish to join our network that has provided statewide coverage since our founding in December, 1986. The HSSR is still crunching the numbers as to what the increase costs will be but a 20 per cent increase is likely what will happen. Our last price increase happened in 2003. In that year a postage stamp was 37 cents and a gallon of gas averaged $1.59 per gallon. A postage stamp today is 68 cents each. A gallon of gas in South Carolina ranges around $3.38 a gallon. No kidding, you go though a lot of gas driving between 35,000 and 40,000 miles a year across South Carolina covering high school athletic events. We also have several other writers we reimburse gas expenses too. Thank goodness we now use more e mailing of our team information forms to the 265 schools across the state, who have varsity athletic teams, but not too long ago our postage budget alone was $6,000 a year! Let’s talk about the value in what we do promote your favorite high school athletic program. I will use a real person in our example. Dr. Phil Wallace is the team doctor of the Dillon High football team. I met him on the sidelines of Dillon football in 1987. He has been sponsoring a full business card ad on the Dillon page of this publication for 37 straight years! Thank you, Dr. Wallace! (Good luck to your cherished alma mater Miami Hurricanes also. His cost for that ad in 1987 was $500 per year. At that time, we didn’t have a website ( hssr.com ). By 2003, we increased a full card ad to $600 a year. We started our web site around the same time. All school sponsor ads, benefiting the statewide coverage of a certain school appear in our publication adjacent to the school’s coverage. This sponsor ad also appears on the school page provided all sponsored schools at hssr.com for no extra charge! We average close to 1 million home page hits at hssr.com per year and the website is also totally free! We also upload the entire contents of our monthly issue to our web site and Dr. Wallace’s ad, and the coverage of his beloved Wildcats, is available on the world wide web to anyone in the world for free! So, let’s review this total market coverage strategy that could also benefit your school. For one price of $600, that has not gone up since 2003, Dr. Wallace’s sponsorship is recognized in the publication with 50,000 annual copies per year, with his sponsor ad duplicated at hssr.com on a web site that averages nearly one million home page hits a year, plus his sponsor ad helps provide Dillon with a free click on “School page” found in the mast head of the web site hssr.com. Is this a deal or what? It will be still be a deal after a slight increase on August, 1 also! Some marketing experts would likely want to have three charges in this situation. They could charge for the yearly print ad, have an additional charge for the ad duplicated on the school page found at hssr.com, and a third charge for the sponsors ad appearing in the publication that is uploaded to the web site for free downloading! How much extra should the $600 full card ad cost be starting on August, 1 st . Please review the aforementioned in your head one more time. When we say that the HSSR is a not-for-profit venture we mean it and we can prove it! However, if we want to stay in business a price increase is justified. Until August, 1 st our year-round coverage packages to cover every varsity sport at your school for the entire 2024-25 school year is as follows: 1/3-page coverage requires a $2,500 sponsorship that covers the publication, web site, and school page. A ½ page coverage requires a $3,500 sponsorship and a full- page coverage requires a $6,000 annual sponsorship. We pay our writers, as a collective group, over $120,000 a year to write monthly articles for the 85 sponsored schools we now have as year-round members of our network, plus bonus coverage of live events that we post on the home page of hssr.com on a ongoing basis. In August, of 2021 the HSSR spent $6,000 to upgrade our web site so every article written on a sponsored school, since that date, is automatically archived for life! We mail our monthly publication to over 250 college athletic programs, from Newberry to Notre Dame . We were recognized by the South Carolina General Assembly in 2001 with a joint resolution honoring our service to high school athletic programs in South Carolina. In 2021, the HSSR was totally surprised to be recognized at halftime of a state championship basketball game with a “Distinguished Service Award” from the National Federation of High Schools . The HSSR was nominated for this service award by the South Carolina High School League and we were humbled to the moon and back to be so recognized. In all honesty, we cover a lot of schools regardless of sponsorship. We cover the vast majority of SCHSL and SCISA state championship events in person, no matter what schools are in the finals. Our stats page, sponsored by Mark Grainger at Modern Turf , is free to any school in South Carolina who can send their stats to hsreport@aol.com , or directly to our stats master of nearly 40 years, Gerald Doolittle at sc7777@aol.com . So, take a minute to look at our year-round sponsored school index on page 79 of this issue. If you do not see your favorite school listed, but would like to help support your favorite school, please call me direct at 843-200-9555. We will be increasing our sponsor fees on August; 1 st so now is a great time to make statewide coverage happen for the hard-working athletes at your favorite school!

The Good, Bad, & Challenges Of Being On A HSSR Deadline! Moncks Corner - The second season of Spring Sports, a.k.a. the play-offs, are in high gear across South Carolina; as the HSSR goes to press (Monday, May 6), and we can all expect many highly competitive games across numerous sports that bring communities together in support of thousands of young student athletes. The HSSR extends best wishes to all teams competing. Always remember, that good sportsmanship will be honored and appreciated in all situations, no matter who is calling the balls and strikes! In the process of my goal of “original and self-directed research” over 100 hours are spent coordinating the production of the nation’s only statewide publication, devoted exclusively to prep sports in any one state during, “deadline week.” In helping prepare this one-of-a-kind 72- page publication, with a joint web site companion known as of hssr.com each month, we have a team of experienced and seasoned writers, a senior photographer with a five-star camera, and a network of contacts second to “no one else” in the Palmetto State. We also thank the high school coaches across the state who understand when they get a call at 11 p.m. on deadline nights, from yours truly, often with this opening comment, “I hope I didn’t wake you, but you never returned my phone calls the past three days, or my 8 text messages, and we go to press in seven hours!” (Reactions vary from Coach to Coach) We feel blessed at the HSSR, and honored, to be a one-of-kind combination print/web site media, devoted exclusively to promoting the positive achievements of our hard-working prep athletes in South Carolina. It has been over 38 years of “one day feeding into the next day:. (Pretty soon you have a whole lot of days making your hair grayer by the day!) Here are just some of the musings, happenings and seat-of-the-pants issues confronted by this Publisher on this deadline alone: For the first time ever a certain high-profiled softball coach in our state was asked “once again” to e-mail the stats of her highly regarded team to the HSSR for information to be used on one of the “Softball Class Feature pages in this very issue. We got the stats in a matter of hours, Thank you! This note was written in the body of the e-mail: “My stats are attached. Will these be published somewhere before playoffs are over? If so, I would prefer to not be included - I don't share stats with my players / parents until after the season;) A short while later this e mail arrived that read: “I appreciate it. If we get to the championship series then I'm good with you using it at that point).” Well, I said this was a “first time ever” because for the past 10 years this coach has always provided stats for our publication that we put up on our widely read stats page, in both the publication and on our web site at hssr.com. I have not checked, but if this team’s games are live streamed through Game Changer or Facebook, that is the best scouting report you could ever give to your opponents. By live streaming your games you could be providing “real video” for opposing coaches to record your athletes in competition allowing them to observe your players strengths and weaknesses batting, fielding and all of the above for example! I am likely to ask God at the Gates of Heaven one day, why is the publishing of players stats somehow giving opponents an advantage over their competition? With all the social media available these days (in real time also) the publishing of stats should be the least of our worries. If stats are not important to the resumes of student athletes, or to the scrap books of our hard-working student athletes, and their parents, then go-ahead and take down the score boards on our ball fields and in our gyms, and quit keeping score! (Yes, I honored the wishes of this coach but I will never request her stats again!) The SCHSL has a wonderful partnership with Max Preps and I wish more coaches would use this media to at least publish their rosters so “we” in the media can make sure we have player’s names spelled correctly. During this deadline one Max Preps soccer team site had a team roster on it, but it was missing the names of all three senior co-captains! (I told one of the parents of this team to leave my name out of the conversation after I had to call them to ask them how they spelled their last name because no roster was available at their game I had just covered). I cover all games using player’s jersey numbers and match the numbers with names later. On this deadline I also got a call back at exactly mid-night from Dillon head softball coach Stevie Grice . “You sound wide awake,” was the first thing he said when I answered the phone, still plugging away on deadline. Got in bed four hours later, and was back-up at 8 am sending text messages and e mails out to coaches all over South Carolina. Lastly, I get some of the most unusual phone calls from people during the tense moments of a deadline. Some folks confuse the HSSR with the SCHSL, and they call at the wrong times sharing their concerns. “Sir, I just want to report that the plate umpire in our game yesterday was so confused that he kept going out to the field ref to consult with him to see if he had the count right out on the batter at the plate. Do you have any idea who this umpire was and why did he get assigned to my team’s game?” After pausing for a few seconds, a stab at humor was attempted, “Mam, I have not a clue who the umpire was in your game yesterday. Nor, can I speak to his apparent confusion. However, it just so happens that the Sports Report needs a current copy of the stats from this team you follow. You mind stopping by the school and asking your favorite coach to send his stats in right away?”