“In Virginia, high school football is a way of life. It’s bigger than Christmas Day.” ~ Sheryl Yoast, Remember The Titans

This fall, replace “In Virginia” with “For Erie media.”

Erie’s newspaper, television and radio stations are attacking tonight’s launch of the high school football season with an unprecedented investment of resources.

Cover of District 10 Kickoff 2010 published by the Erie Times-News

Actually, the work started months ago, as the Erie Times-News sports and special project divisions joined forces on the 112-page Kickoff magazine. Billed as “packed with information on each team in D-10 and McDowell, the first-of-its-kind publication promises to fulfill every District 10 football junkie’s needs!” Ingeniously, the magazine is being distributed far beyond the newspaper’s normal delivery footprint at Country Fair stores and costs $5.00. There is even a Facebook fan page of the mag.

So that regular subscribers don’t feel left out, the ETN on Thursday published their special high school football preview issue of the weekly Varsity tabloid, with another 48 pages of schedules, rankings and predictions. All of this data is also available on GoErie.com, where they will again provide ongoing scores and commentary Friday nights via their live blog, on the Varsity page of the site.

Once you get all hyped up for the games by reading about the players and prospects, you can listen to them live on the radio. Erie County stations WCTL and WJET will have weekly games. WCTL’s PAB-award winning broadcast team begins its 19^th year of county-wide coverage with two games this weekend: Fort LeBoeuf at Harborcreek tonight, and General McLane at Strong Vincent, live from Vets Stadium Saturday night. WJET covers Cathedral Prep football throughout the season, and has the big McDowell/Prep matchup at the Stadium tonight at 7:00 PM.

Both stations are worth following on Twitter, as they will tweet quarterly scores and answer listener inquiries. WJET plans an hour long Friday night wrap up show at 10:00.

Finally, you have to watch the big plays on the 11:00 news, right? Actually, on WFXP you don’t have to wait so long, since Fox 66 now has the hour-long newscast from 10-11. The WJET/WFXP combo ran their hour-long football preview the last couple nights (but not offering it as a YouTube…hmmmm). They will have the highlights packaged on their Friday Night Lights wrapup program.

On the WICU/WSEE side is the SportsBlitz with vets Gary Drapcho and Mike Ruzzi leading the charge. As an aside, perhaps the greatest benefit of the 12/35 merger that caused so much pain is the teaming of these two knowledgeable and respected veterans. They love Erie sports, know it without exception and it shows. The SportsBlitz is usually available as a WMV video download, so the kids can watch that amazing tackle, over and over and over!

Get the picture? Millions of pages, pixels, spoken words, and feet of tape; all to bring you exhaustive coverage of local high school football. It’s exciting, but I hope the audience is there for all of this. Seemingly the advertisers and dollars are there, or the media outlets wouldn’t do it.

Go team!