Ready for high school football? The Journal's Sports staff is, as practices start today

Expectations have changed.

My first fall covering high school football for The Providence Journal, I had a "plan" for how we could cover the sport in a way the state had never seen before.

It wasn't a good one. My plans are usually just frantic ramblings, hoping the person understands what I'm saying. The final plea was a simple one — trust me. Let me do things and if they’re not working, I’ll know before anyone else does.

Six years later, The Providence Journal is the state’s leader in high school football coverage. Our ideas have led to plenty of copycats as they try to catch up, but we continue to move forward with new ways to bring you the best high school football coverage possible.

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In short, we’re not going to settle for being No. 1. We’re going to try to be better.

High school football season starts today, as teams can hit the practice fields across Rhode Island. What has me most excited about this season is the addition to our team. Jake Rousseau covered high school football in Vermont better than anybody. It will take him time to learn the teams, the coaches and the players in Rhode Island, but he’s already hit the ground running. Last year, we managed to get bylines — photo or writing — for 38 of the state’s 43 teams, a new company record that we’ll try to break this fall.

The Providence Journal will own Friday nights. We plan on having the entire team — Bill Koch, Rousseau and myself — at games every Friday, with photographers in tow. We’ll have analyses from these games as well as photos up every Saturday morning, along with a brief recap of the games we were not able to witness.

High school football games aren’t limited to Fridays. Thursday night games have grown in popularity and you can expect The Journal to be out there every week. While we won’t cover them with the same intensity — there are several other sports to cover during the fall — The Journal will be at one Thursday game every week.

Saturdays are usually a day of rest, but if there’s a big game on the weekend, we’ll find a way to be there in some capacity. If my kids’ soccer schedules allow, I might be out there ever Saturday.

Game coverage is the easy part. What happens leading up to the games is how we’ve separated ourselves.

Our preseason will provide depth and knowledge about the players and expectations for all 43 Rhode Island Interscholastic League teams. With our team bigger for the fall, we’re also going to try to expand coverage to the state’s two football-playing prep schools — Portsmouth Abbey and St. George’s.

Our player lists have become a reader favorite. Last year, we went off-script and tried to break things down positionally, but this fall, we’ll be back to letting you know who are the players to watch in each division and subdivision.

For team previews, we’re going to try to provide more analysis for each of the 43 teams. In the past, we’ve provided fact boxes to supplement stories, but we wanted more depth with our coverage. We’re hoping the insight we have will provide just that.

The Providence Journal Preseason All-State Team has become a fan favorite and will be back again. Who knows — we may even name some Preseason MVPs from each division and write about them leading into the season.

Over the past two years, we’ve tried to get the football community more involved with coverage and the Player of the Week Award has done just that. This fall, we’re going to try something new with our Preseason Player of the Year vote where we pick one player from each team we think will be instrumental to their success. From there, readers can vote for their favorite and we’ll see just which football community can drum up the most support for their own.

During the season, I’ll continue to write my weekly power rankings and, yes, we'll have a weekly picks column, too.

Throughout the season, we’ll also have features and trend pieces on high school football, the kind of stories you can only find by being out there in the trenches.

We’ll have video highlights on our website and social media. On Friday nights, you’ll be able to find me on your TV on Fox Providence and WPRI’s Friday Night Blitz.

The next few weeks are going to be frantic as we gather information and prepare you for the upcoming season with content you won’t find anywhere else. The season will start, the playoffs will come in the blink of an eye and before you know it, we’ll be prepping for Super Bowls wondering what happened to the season.

And if we did our jobs right, you’ll already know.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Ready for high school football? The Journal's Sports staff is, as practices start today