New Year, New Tradition

Usually, I don’t like to mess with tradition.

Maybe it was all those years covering college football. Maybe it’s superstition. Maybe it’s a matter of being sensible enough not to try to fix something that isn’t broken.

That’s why I thought long and hard this fall about whether the Herald Courier should change the way it selects and presents its all-star football team.

I kept coming to the same conclusion: It was time for a change.

It’s not a complete departure from the past, but it is a dramatic – and needed – one.

The Herald Courier has since 1965 selected two postseason all-star football teams: one for Southwest Virginia and the other for Northeast Tennessee.

I’m not certain exactly why it was set up that way. It could have been to get more athletes’ names into the paper, and I’m all for that. It also makes some sense because, unlike basketball, there aren’t a lot of crossover games by which to compare players.

However, I suspect it was done more to keep folks on either side of the state line happy. As I’ve written before, we’re regularly accused of favoring one state over the other, and we get it from both sides.
I’m certain my predecessors figured they’d save themselves a lot of grief by choosing two teams.

But, while that might have made sense in 1965, when the Herald Courier almost certainly covered a broader area and many more schools, it doesn’t in 2008. Picking teams based on geography is neither an accurate reflection of how we as a sports staff try to cover high school athletics or of our circulation area.

As I mentioned earlier, we’re not departing completely from tradition. Inside on page B6, you’ll see we’ve again picked a Northeast Tennessee team and a Southwest Virginia team. We’ve also selected offensive and defensive players and a coach of the year from both states. That way, we continue to honor our own tradition.

But we’re going a step further this year, by picking an All-Bristol Herald Courier Dream Team. You’ll find it on pages B4 and B5.

Why do this?

Consider a breakdown of the two state teams we picked. The Northeast Tennessee team is comprised exclusively of players from the three Mountain Lakes Conference schools we cover – Tennessee High, Sullivan East and Sullivan Central – while the Southwest Virginia team is selected from among more than 20 schools in six districts.

Clearly, it’s a lot tougher to make the Southwest Virginia team.

It’s even tougher to make the Dream Team, which is the way it should be. Because players from every program we cover were considered, we believe it is more prestigious to earn a spot in this lineup.

We also named an offensive player, a defensive player and a coach of the year. As with the Dream Team, geography was not supposed to be a consideration.

Still, it can be hard to shake old notions about that sort of thing.

We were pretty much in agreement on Tazewell’s Matt Muncy and Clintwood’s Alec Osborne as our players of the year, but it was a tough call on the coach.

The choice came down to Holston’s Jason Matlock, who in two seasons achieved a remarkable turnaround with that program, and Tennessee High’s Greg Stubbs, who despite a long list of injuries to key players, kept his Vikings in league contention and got them into the state playoffs.

At one point in the discussion, one writer suggested we might want to give stronger consideration to Stubbs because it would look bad if we didn’t have a Northeast Tennessee representative among the top three honorees.

It was a fair point, and we discussed it at some length.

Finally, I asked my staff: If geography was not an issue, which coach appeared to deserve the honor more? The vote was unanimous for Matlock.

It’s worth noting, for those who do care about geography, that no school has more representatives on our Dream Team than Tennessee High.

The Dream Team is supposed to be the best of the best – from across our coverage area.

I believe this team is just that.

That’s a tradition worth keeping.

JIM CNOCKAERT is sports editor of the Bristol Herald Courier. He can be reached at and at (276) 645-2572.