Kickoff Classics, Jamborees, Pre-Season Games

I'm not familiar with every state, but I do know in Georgia and Florida, high school football teams are allowed to play a Kickoff Classic, Jamboree or Pre-Season game. Georgia is allowed two games, while Florida allows one. Does your paper cover pre-season games?

 

The paper I do most of my freelancing for covering the biggest of the Jamborees, and I'm guessing it was the most-read story online the next day.

 

Utah has an endowment game where the state association takes a 50 percent cut. It's treated as a regular game by the media.

 

Yes, we do. We preview them too.

 

This year, Mississippi went to a two-quarter jamboree and added a "Classic" game that counts, with the MHSAA getting 50 percent of the gate. The Sun Herald covered a couple of jamborees (at least one was the three-team variety, where there was six quarters played). Classic games were last week and it was a regular Friday night for us.

 

In Michigan, jamborees are cross country meets with entire leagues involved. Never understood why.

 

Here in Vicksburg, we've always had the Red Carpet Bowl. I think it was counted as a "Classic" once they moved it to the beginning of the year. Seems like, since I've been here, it's always been the first week of the season though.
Other than that, the MPSA/MAIS -- whatever they call themselves now -- teams can play a scrimmage and a jamboree in the two weeks before the season. I think the public schools can play a jamboree the week before, but not every team does.

 

we never used to cover jamborees, but I broke that rule this year because one jamboree brought together five of our primary teams, but we didn't cover it from a play-by-play angle, simply that it was the first time it had been done and there was a lot of interest. a lot of the five teams used to play each other, but because of expanded regions, they lost those rivalry games.
of course, on monday i had three messages telling me that the other schools never get any coverage. depressing.

 

And I thought jamborees were unique to Louisiana (just another Louisiana party and all that). They are fairly big deals in Louisiana. Some will get eight teams playing four half-games in one stadium. Others will be two half-games. None count, but they are big enough events to cover and will be centerpiece front page stories in most metro paper sports pages, I'd imagine, especially with college football still a week away.

 

The season is eight games in Alaska and there's only two weeks of practice before opening night, so the jamboree one week before the season is a godsend. It's where we get most of our rosters and interviews for preview articles done. As for covering the event itself, we usually treat it like a "football season's back" feature, and it's a widely read piece since it involves five teams.

 

We do. Schools in our area play three non-district, i.e. preseason games, before playing seven district contests. We do advances and a huge weekly Monday notebook for all games, including preseason.

 

We treat the soccer/volleyball jamborees in our area in a similar fashion. A couple good stand-alone photos run the next day, plus our sportswriters can track down coaches in person for season preview/tab purposes. As you say, it's great to have many of your teams in one place.

And by the way, may I extend a welcome to SportsJournalists.com to the gentleman from Fairbanks, Alaska. Hope the wildfires have finally died down up there, before the weather starts to turn nasty.