WETUMPKA, Ala . - High school athletics has never had more ways to reach people.
Local radio, newspapers and television still play an important role in covering high school sports, especially in communities like Wetumpka. That isn't changing. Good local coverage matters, and having people outside the school tell the stories of its athletes and teams is good for any athletic program.
But there is also a reality that comes with covering high school sports today: there is simply too much happening for traditional media outlets to be everywhere.
Think about how many athletic events Wetumpka High School will play during one school year. Football and volleyball in the fall turn into basketball and wrestling in the winter. Then comes baseball, softball, soccer, track, golf, tennis and everything else on the calendar. Add varsity and junior varsity schedules together and you're talking about hundreds of events.
No newspaper can send a reporter to all of them. No radio station can broadcast every game. Local television has only so much time available for high school sports each night. That's not a failure of traditional media. It's just the math. And it means high school athletic departments have an opportunity to do something they couldn't realistically do 15 or 20 years ago: help cover themselves.
That's part of what Wetumpka Athletics is doing with its new AthleticOS platform.
WetumpkaIndians.com and the Wetumpka Indians mobile app give the athletic department one place to keep up with schedules, scores, rosters, stories, livestreams, team information and individual athletes. It gives fans a place to start when they want to know what's happening with the Indians.
But the bigger opportunity is what Wetumpka can do with that platform.
If the basketball team wins on a Tuesday night and nobody from the local media is there, that game doesn't have to become nothing more than a score posted on Facebook. There can be a recap. If a wrestler wins a tournament, there's a place to tell that story. If a soccer player has a huge night, a track athlete breaks a school record or the softball team wins an important area game, Wetumpka doesn't have to wait and hope somebody else has the time or resources to cover it. The school can cover it.
That doesn't mean Wetumpka should try to replace traditional media. It shouldn't. Independent coverage from newspapers, radio and television brings something different. Those outlets have their own audiences, their own voices and their own ability to tell stories about Wetumpka Athletics. The two can work together.
When local media can be at a Wetumpka event, great. When they can't, the athletic department now has the ability to make sure something is still written, posted and preserved from that night. And over the course of a school year, that adds up.
There are plenty of athletes who will never play in the game that gets the biggest radio broadcast or television highlights. There are teams that may only receive traditional coverage a handful of times during an entire season. Those athletes are still putting in the work every day. Their parents are still in the stands. Their coaches are still building programs. They're still representing Wetumpka. They deserve to be part of the story, too.
That's where having your own platform becomes valuable.
Wetumpka can decide that every sport matters. It can publish the final score from a volleyball match, write about a basketball game, recognize a wrestling performance and cover baseball and softball without having to worry about whether there is enough room in tomorrow's newspaper or enough time in tonight's sportscast.
And instead of all of that information eventually getting buried on social media, it has a permanent home.
Social media is still incredibly important. It's probably where many fans will first see a final score or find out that a new story has been published. But anyone who has tried to find a Facebook post from six months ago knows the problem. Social media wasn't built to be an athletic department's record book. A school athletics platform can be. A schedule can lead to a final score. A final score can connect to a recap. A roster can connect to an athlete. Stories about that athlete can become part of the same profile over the course of his or her career. That gives Wetumpka a chance to do more than simply post what's happening today. It can begin building a real record of what is happening across the athletic department year after year.
It also changes how Wetumpka communicates with its fans.
The Wetumpka Indians app gives the athletic department a direct line to the people who choose to follow it. Scores, stories, schedule changes and other updates can be sent through push notifications instead of relying entirely on whether Facebook or another social platform decides to put a post in someone's feed.
The same idea carries over to the athletes themselves. Every athlete in the AthleticOS system can have an individual profile connected to his or her team. For athletes interested in playing at the next level, RecruitOS gives Wetumpka another way to organize recruiting information, film, measurables and other information college coaches may be looking for.
For Wetumpka, all of these pieces come back to the same idea. A high school athletic department produces an unbelievable amount of information every year. Games are played. Scores come in. Records are broken. Seniors play their final games. Freshmen have breakout performances. Coaches reach milestones. Athletes sign scholarships. Teams make playoff runs. Some of those moments will receive great coverage from local media. Some won't. There are simply too many of them for anyone outside the school to catch them all. That's why the role of the athletic department is changing.
Wetumpka isn't trying to become a newspaper or a television station. It's making sure that when something worth talking about happens in Wetumpka Athletics, there is a place for it to be told.
For the athletes and coaches living those moments, that's important. For parents and fans trying to follow them, it's useful. And years from now, when somebody wants to look back and remember what happened, it'll still be there. That's a pretty good reason for a school to start telling more of its own story.