Our high school basketball coverage kicks off this weekend with a significant new partnership to enhance and profile more of the experience and opportunities available to area schools and athletes.
When we first met with Athletes In Action Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Hauge last March, he expressed an interest in how the familiar physical, mental, and spiritual training facility in Xenia might coordinate with the Press Pros site to enhance the experience of adolescent interscholastic competition through our daily coverage.
Minster Bank proudly sponsors the best in area sports stories on Press Pros Magazine.com.
“We’re aware of your platform,” said Hauge in that meeting. “And might there be a way that we can work together?”
Their interest centered around getting out the word about the gorgeous 250-acre campus and comprehensive sports facility bordering Xenia’s southeast side – a bit of what you don’t know about what you don’t know!
Publisher Sonny Fulks writes OHSAA and Ohio State sports for Press Pros Magazine.com.
Ours centered around expanding the coverage of area basketball up and down I-75 and east and west into the bordering counties. For instance, if there are two marquee games on the same night in the same conference, or county, how can we cover both instead of choosing just one?
Let’s work together, it was suggested, and that partnership in mutual marketing of literally…athletes in action…will become manifest Friday night with coverage of three area basketball games in Division V, VI, and VII.
Because, when the Ohio High School Athletic Association expanded high school basketball to seven divisions two years ago to afford more competitive opportunity in the post-season, they couldn’t expand an already-stretched-thin journalistic base to cover additional divisions, particularly those in the rural counties. It is what it is, the old saying goes.
But Athletes In Action’s sponsorship with Press Pros is making a more defined context for ‘it is what it is’ possible.
“The way that Press Pros covers, and serves, sports is very similar to the way in which we seek to serve through sports,” says Hauge. “Their coverage is top tier, and I think the resources that we can provide are likewise top tier. So I think it’s a really beautiful partnership.”
“The way that Press Pros covers and serves sports is very similar to the way in which we seek to serve through sports. I think it’s a beautiful partnership.” – Jonathan Hauge, Athletes In Action
Athletes In Action was founded in 1966 by former Oklahoma State football player Dave Hannah. It’s founding centered around it being the sports arm for the organization then known as Campus Crusade for Christ. In more recent years, they’ve expanded their outreach and resources to include a world-class training facility in Xenia that includes state-of-the-art housing along with nutrition and training facilities that support nearly every sport imaginable.
“Massillon football came here for a pre-season training camp this summer,” adds Hauge. “They stayed in our dorms, used our turf football facilities, our chef cooked for them, and it was like a collegiate experience for a high school program. Our goal is to help create culture quickly in ways that will last for an entire season.”
At Press Pros our goal was to have expanded writing and photography resources to better profile the best and most competitive community basketball in Ohio…in leagues like the Miami Valley League, Three Rivers Conference, Central Buckeye Conference, the MAC, the Western Buckeye League, and the Shelby County League. And with the help of Athletes In Action, and Jonathan Hauge, you’ll see the first fruits of the partnership on Friday.
They’re excited.
We’re excited.
And it’s alright for you to be excited, too.
For once there’s actually some meaning to a phrase – in the basketball sense – that no one before ever took seriously. It is…what it is!
Athletes In Action is proud to be a presenting sponsor of area basketball on Press Pros Magazine.com.