This week's TheFletch

Enjoy this week's edition of TheFletch! and log on tonight to http://gpb.org/sports for the Collins Hill/Roswell game

High school football started with a bang last week as the Corky Kell Classic ushered in the 2010 season. Sports Radio 790 The Zone was at the Georgia Dome all day long, providing play-by-play for all four games pitting Gwinnett County schools against Cobb County schools. The two crews were fun to listen to, but the regular Friday night crew of Trey McDaniel and John Michaels was outstanding. McDaniel is a true pro at calling the games, setting the scene with a rich voice that does not allow for any campiness that some radio play-by-play men can sometimes slip into without realizing it. Perfectly contrasting McDaniel is Michaels who, despite being a Miami Hurricanes fan, really knows the game. You can tell Michaels has talked about football for years and loves performing. Michaels always seems to have a good time when paired with McDaniel, sometimes rendering McDaniel speechless with a wrestling reference, but only for a second as McDaniel immediately clicks back to calling the game. The entire day was great fun. The 790 guys really did a good job and folks riding around Friday nights should tune in to 790 to catch McDaniel and Michaels calling football.
In case you missed the Corky Kell Classic, you can still go back and watch them, with 790’s crew piped in over the video on gpb.org/sports or you can find the link on gaprepnews.com. And one final note on the Kell Classic, kudos to Scott Janovitz for working with the 790 crews at halftime and in between games, providing recruiting news and nuggets and also breaking down other sports to keep everyone sane. (Of course, for more Scott Janovitz and his recruiting insight, tune to Sports Radio 790 The Zone for Score Atlanta’s The Official Visit.)

The 2009 high school football season achieved record ratings for Georgia Public Broadcasting and because of the popularity, GPB media has responded by striking up a partnership with Score Atlanta to launch a new division GPB Sports. The new entity will, according to a article on Score Atlanta’s website “change the way Georgians experience high school sports by creating new programs and access across all its platforms.”
Score Atlanta’s president IJ Rosenberg was named director of sports for GPB and will oversee all of GPB’s online sports programming and marketing while also serving as executive producer of GPB’s weekly television sports program GPB Sports Central.

Sports Central kicked off earlier this week and can be seen on GPB-TV every Wednesday night at 7:30 with replays Friday nights at 11 p.m. and Saturday morning at noon, both replays complete with sports scores. The show itself will be complete with breaking news, features and polls from around the state.

Immediately following the show online will be Sports Central XL, a live webcast and video chat. The webshow will feature interviews with coaches, players and other important figures on the high school scene. Guests for the first show included North Gwinnett’s Bob Sphire, Collins Hill coach Kevin Reach and an expert discussing concussions on the high school level. You can catch Sports Central XL on gpb.org/sports.

Finally, GPB once again proudly presents Friday night football on gpb.org/sports. Last week Charles Ward and I brought you Collins Hill and Roswell, live from Collins Hill. This season’s slate looks to be incredible as GPB will once again travel all over the state to bring the best games to the web and into your living room. For the complete schedule, visit gpb.org/sports or scoreatl.com.

Georgia Public Broadcasting isn’t the only place to see certain high school games this season. ESPN2 arranged for the Carver-Columbus/LaGrange game to move a 24 hours to September 17 so that the “World Wide Leader” could broadcast the game. Carver-Columbus has a pair of players in the ESPN Top 150 in Isaiah Crowell and Gabe Wright and LaGrange is a traditional state power that ESPN2 felt the need to get the game shifted to another night in order to broadcast it. Two-time defending Class-AAAAA state champion Camden also is going to be on national television this season, taking on a team from Florida, and in order to be on television, the school required two other schools to move a game to earlier in the season to accommodate a schedule change with Camden. Savannah High School and Groves were forced to play one week early so that Camden could face Savannah on the date that the other two were first scheduled for, just to squeeze in a game against a team from Miami. I have a small problem with this. I realize it is good exposure for a high school recruit to be on national television, but having TWO other schools move a date around so you could open up a spot on your schedule? That just seems selfish to me. If television didn’t want your game, then you don’t get a game in front of the country. Don’t inconvenience two other programs so that YOU can get some big-time exposure. YOU, yourself, need to try and make it work. Don’t make others do your dirty work.

I caught the first hour or so of the “Young Guns” on 790 The Zone last week and I must say that the show was a bit slow. Several different candidates rotated in and out with Steak Shapiro from Mayhem in the AM leading the discussion, but it wasn’t much of a discussion. It was a while before Shapiro let the “young guns” really talk and even then, it was a bit more of a job interview than an actual radio show. Then Shapiro seemed to tire of the concept towards the end and the discussion waned from sports to other non-sports topics, fine for talk radio, but not for SPORTS talk radio. I spoke with one of the young guns candidates, whose name I will not divulge, and he said he didn’t feel he got enough time on the air as much of it was dominated by Shapiro. He said he wished he could have gotten to make a few more points. I’m interested to see how far the station is going to let the young guns go in the future and if they’ll be let off the leash anytime soon.


Can you believe he said that?
“We’re nearing September and we’re anticipating one of those down-to-the-final-weekend chases that emblazoned 1991 and 1993 in our memory, but …It won’t happen.”
That was the AJC’s Mark Bradley taking all of the fun out of the stretch run of the baseball season. Bradley hypothesizes that both the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies will make the postseason, so it really doesn’t matter who wins the division. Except that it does. I’d rather face the second best possible opponent as a division-winner instead of the best possible opponent as the wild card winner. I certainly hope the Braves and the Phillies both make the playoffs and meet up in the NLCS, but don’t say that the rest of the season doesn’t matter. It clearly does.