Polls Week 6: Colonial’s Turn

First of all, my thanks to the people who approached me this past week thanking us at ATVN for featuring the Colonial League last week on our broadcasts.

I’ve heard workers with vast experience in customer relations say that people will not hesitate to approach you with concerns or issues they are having, but it takes a lot to get people to take the time to give praise when you do something they like.

If that theory is true, we must have made a lot of people happy last week!

The Astound TV Network featured a pair of Colonial League teams–Northwestern and Saucon Valley–as our featured Friday night live game.  We also devoted most of last week’s SportsTalk show to discussing issues in the Colonial-Schuylkill “co-op.”

It was our pleasure to feature those teams and talk about the outstanding players in that league (as well as talk about a very competitive league playoff race shaping up).  It is our hope to focus on those teams even more going forward and we hope to see some of these teams go far in the state playoffs!

Sadly, we also had to send some time on last week’s program talking about more tragedies in high school sports–and in our viewing area in particular.

So far already this school year, we have lost two scholastic athletes who died because of senseless crimes committed (at Whitehall and Allen high schools) and a teacher’s aide (at Dieruff High School) killed because of reckless driving.

There have been several football programs in Pennsylvania that have canceled their seasons due to  “undisclosed reasons,” which unfortunately usually occurs when kids (allegedly) commit acts so over-the-line that the school must take quick action as punishment and perform lengthy investigations.

Other schools are canceling sports programs due to lack of interest and not being able to field enough students to participate.  Also, we’ve had a couple reports of students (who happen to be on sports teams) bringing guns to school.

Meanwhile, many games are getting scrapped or rescheduled due to a desperate lack of officials.  At last week’s District XI press conference, instead of leading off with information on the new playoff formats or some of the other positive things going on in high school sports, a good amount of time was spent by local administrators begging for more people to get involved in local sports to referee or umpire games.

We are going to start seeing some rather drastic changes to scheduling local sports playoff games soon–due mostly because there simply aren’t enough officials to have games being played at their “normal” times.

I myself have had several opportunities a number of years ago to decide on whether I wanted to work in the sports or news areas of communications–and I picked the former because I really didn’t want to deal with all the negativity that comes with the latter.

Unfortunately, sports on many levels is dealing more with “news-related” types of stories right now, and it has certainly darkened what once was a very promising local sports season.

Hopefully things change around very soon.  I would love to spend more time on the positive things going on in our viewing area and deeply hope we don’t have any more tragic events affecting our sports communities for a long time to come!

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Below we have high school polls for both leagues in the ATVN viewing area, along with the listing of all of the teams that are included in our respective categories.

EPC TOP 5

1. Emmaus
2. Freedom
3. Nazareth
4. Central Catholic
5. Northampton

Eligible Teams (in no particular order):

Northampton, Bethlehem Catholic, Easton, Freedom, Liberty, Dieruff, Allen, Allentown Central Catholic, Parkland, Whitehall, Emmaus, and Nazareth.

COLONIAL TOP 4

1. Notre Dame-GP
2. Northwestern
3. Northern Lehigh
4. Southern Lehigh

Eligible Teams (in no particular order):

Bangor, Pen Argyl, Notre Dame – Green Pond, Wilson, Catasauqua, Salisbury, Saucon Valley, Northwestern, Northern Lehigh and Southern Lehigh.

 

Be sure to check back to our website for our weekly polls and check our upcoming broadcast information frequently for any changes for our ongoing sports schedule throughout the fall season.

 

The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Astound Broadband or any other agency, organization, employer or company.