Those who can’t be at tonight’s Centerville vs. Wayne high school football game will find plenty of ways to get updates.
First, there’s the national broadcast on ESPNU.
There are three radio stations broadcasting live — WONE-AM (980), which does a Greater Western Ohio Conference game of the week, WSWO-FM (97.7 or 101.1), which broadcasts Wayne games, and WCWT-FM (107.3), the Centerville High School station.
If none of those work, Centerville has established a real-time statistical update website with software provided by DakStats.
The options underline the increased attention and efforts to provide fans with live updates of high school sporting events, most notably football games. As technology has advanced, so have the avenues that fans not attending the game, and even throughout the country and around the world, can learn about the action inside the high school stadium.
“It’s kind of the new frontier,” said Tom Farmer, executive producer for Fox Sports Ohio, which is broadcasting nine southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky games on Thursday nights this season. “With the advent of regional sports networks and the Web, the untapped market of high schools can be tapped.”
The Wayne-Centerville game is one of 32 to be broadcast on ESPN properties this season as part of the network’s push to include more prep programming. Dan Margulis, ESPN’s director of programming and acquisitions, said the network chooses games that represent long-standing rivalries or include star players.
As a GWOC Central Division game that has been one of the area’s best for more than a decade and that includes two Ohio State recruits — Wayne quarterback Braxton Miller and Centerville two-way lineman Michael Bennett — as well as Division I recruits in defensive lineman Kyle Rose (West Virginia) and linebacker Mike Replogle (Indiana) from Centerville, this game includes those elements, Margulis said.
Not that broadcasting games is new. Farmer recalled working for a PBS station in Cleveland that produced games in the late 1960s.
But what is new, he said, is the extent of the broadcasts. The Ohio High School Athletic Association lists 147 radio stations or websites that broadcast games, and ESPN properties, Fox Sports Ohio, Ohio News Network and Miami Valley Cable Council all include high school football games on their fall schedules.
Individual teams also have increased their efforts to update fans. GWOC Commissioner Eric Spahr attends one game each Friday night, but he also receives texts with updates throughout the conference and updates the GWOC’s Twitter feed.
“It’s evolved,” Spahr said. “Anything less (than regular updates) is not satisfactory.”
The special treats for the teams and fans are television broadcasts, but ESPN and Fox Sports Ohio executives said there isn’t much room for more growth. The broadcasts are expensive for the networks, they said, and they don’t want to interrupt the unique atmosphere of the high school environment.
“Then again,” Margulis, of ESPN, said, “every time you think we’ve maxed out, something else comes up that we can do.”
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