We Are Making a Difference. HSjox.com is a network of volunteers and business professionals organized to empower students and schools to make a difference in their communities. We harness the unlimited energy and enthusiasm of people's love for high school sports for the benefit of all.
We Are Responding to Urgent Needs: Schools today are facing two major issues:
1) Budget cuts are eliminating many electives that students love. Amongst these are often programs in journalism and photography. Such programs develop early stage skills and harness their passions for capturing stories and experiences. Teenagers are at a crucial stage in the nurturing of their potential long-term career decisions. For their interests to mature from avocation to vocation, they need some meaningful experiences to explore if such a path is right for them.
We help support teachers of journalism and photography by helping to organize, train, and actually publish their work in a professional Internet publication in cooperation with the school.
2) Coverage of high school sports by regional newspapers is rapidly disappearing around the country, because newspapers are rapidly going bankrupt. This is not because people are no longer reading; rather they are reading on the Internet. In the short term, this spells major problems for high school sports coverage.
We Bring Solutions in Three Ways: We help solve these issues through integration and technology investments:
1) We help bring the English Departments and Athletic Departments together to address both challenges. When a school decides to join our network, we help provide the organization and training to get kids involved with athletic programs in ways they did not realize was possible. There are many students who love sports, but are simply unable to play on the field. We help them play on the sidelines and support their school and conferences by promoting the players and coaches on the field and the conference rivalries of which they are a part.
While doing this, they build valuable skills, a portfolio of creditable work, pursue their passions, and provide a valuable service to their community.
Students learn: how to write stories, edit them for accuracy, focus, and impact; capture photos and videos, conduct informative and respectful interviews, meet deadlines, and meet new friends. They are also maturing by learning to make commitments, organizing coverage, planning ahead, and how to give genuine praise.
2) We have invested substantial sums in making a professional technology platform easy for high school students to execute and for teachers to administer that no school or conference could afford to do.
3) We provide a stage larger than individual high schools. By creating a network across conferences and states, student athletes and their coaches and teams will be recognized by hundreds of thousands of viewers every month. We will cover high school sports in greater depth than any other media. In fact our stories and game coverage will be shared with main-stream media to provide even greater coverage and prestige to students, their teams, and their schools.
We Operate in Praise Athletics and Abide by a Code of Conduct: Everyone who joins our network, whether students, teachers, administrators, or regional organizing publishers, must acknowledge that they will abide by a Code of Conduct. This Code is designed to foster: recognition, respect, and responsibility to the credit of our schools and the good of the game.
We do not allow comments by parents, students, or other readers to, in any way, disparage our athletes, faculty, or officials. No trash talking of competitors and no coverage of misbehavior. This is the semi-professional coverage of sports that high schools deserve and that parents and readers want.
So if you want to make a difference for your school, come join us. We are adding new schools every month.
