We should probably talk about how we write. If you have read anything on this site for longer than one sentence, you have noticed that we are a little snarky. We tell jokes. We talk in second person. We bust on parents who argue about Power Index at pasta dinners. We are not the Wall Street Journal, and we were never trying to be.
There is a reason for this, and we want to say it out loud.
Maine high school sports deserve a voice that sounds like Maine.
A lot of sports coverage reads like somebody forgot to put the human back in. It is all passive voice and official standings and the quarterback is described as "the signal caller" in paragraph three. That is fine for SportsCenter. It is not fine for us, because we are not SportsCenter. We are a small group of Mainers who think your kid's 4x400 relay was the best thing that happened on a Tuesday night.
So we write the way we would talk in your kitchen. We crack jokes. We bust on the rankings when the rankings deserve it. We try to keep it loose, because Maine high school sports ARE loose. It is schools with 90 kids in a graduating class. It is coaches who also teach sophomore geometry. It is game nights where the announcer is somebody's dad and the halftime music is nine straight seconds of feedback. You cannot cover that with a straight face. You would be lying.
Also, snark is a form of love. If we rib GameIQ for picking the wrong team, we are making fun of ourselves, because we built GameIQ. If we make fun of coaches for writing PI calculations on napkins, we are also the nerds who built a whole Matchup Lab page so nobody ever has to do the napkin version again. If we tease the booster club, it is because the booster club has always treated us like family, and it is what family does.
Here is the serious part. We do not joke about this.
Read this next part slow.
We write about everybody. Not just the first place finisher. Not just the top seven ranked teams. Not just the kid who got the scholarship. Everybody. Our job is to make sure the kid who took fourteenth at his conference meet knows that the fourteenth place time ran through our nightly data the same way the winning time did. His name is in the database. His PR is tracked. When he runs it again next week and shaves two seconds off, we are counting.
We write for the last place kid in his first competition. The kid who got pulled into the 800 because somebody was hurt. The kid who has never run a race in his life and whose parents took a half day off work to come watch. The kid who finishes, exhausted, not totally sure where the finish line was, and sees his time posted on a page that also tracks the state champion. Same page. Same font. Same respect.
We write for the senior who never broke the starting lineup. Four years of practice. Four years of bus rides to away games. Two minutes of garbage time in a blowout. We built a Teams page that still lists his name on the roster and a season report that will still count his at bat. Nobody writes about him anywhere else. We will.
We write for the JV kid who got one hit all spring. That hit is in our data. When we say "drove in the winning run," that is him. He is the game winner. Forever, or at least as long as we keep the servers on.
The snark is the wrapper. The love is the job.
The tone on this site is loose because loose is honest. But what you are actually reading, underneath the jokes, is the most stubborn and sincere thing we know how to build. We want every kid who laces up in Maine to see their name somewhere on this site and feel like somebody noticed. One number on one page. That is the whole game.
The first place finisher has plenty of places to be celebrated. Local paper, school assembly, mom's Facebook post, occasionally ESPN. Great. We hope they keep winning.
The other kids, though. The sophomore outfielder batting .187 who keeps showing up to the Saturday 7 a.m. cage work. The pole vaulter who has never cleared seven feet and is going to hit eight this spring if it kills her. The senior starting goalie on a 2 and 14 team who is starting anyway because she earned it. They are why we do this. If they leave this site knowing their name was on it, we did the job.
So read the rankings. Laugh at the jokes. Argue with GameIQ. Good. But know this, while you are here. The serious thing is still there, underneath every bar chart and every snarky caption. We love them all. Dead last to first place. Freshman to senior. B team to varsity. The kid who quit after week three and the kid who made it to states. Every single one of them.
That is the whole article. Thanks for reading.
Now go cook.