Mike Ridaught
What a year for our high school sports coverage.
Last week, I was in Clermont at Legends Way Ballfields broadcasting the Fort White vs. Dixie County softball game in the Class 1A state semifinals. It was the first final four in program history for both of those programs.
Two weeks ago, Marty Pallman was at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers to broadcast Dixie County (Cross City) and Columbia (Lake City) baseball. It was the first final four in program history for the Bears and the Tigers too.
When Hawthorne played Bradford (Starke) in the Class 1A state basketball semifinals in Lakeland, Marty was there to broadcast the game “live” on local radio.
Marty and I were also there in December when Hawthorne advanced to its second straight Class 1A football state championship game in Tallahassee.
Each weekday during the school year we kept you updated with ThePrepZone.com Sports Report presented by Radiant Credit Union on 106.9 FM “I am Country.” The 1-minute high school sports vignettes were produced by yours truly and aired every weekday morning around 7:50 a.m.
Our final report for the 2021-22 school year was on Friday, May 27. However, the past 30 days are archived here. We will resume the reports on August 1, 2022.
On Wednesday night at the Sonic Drive-In of Gainesville, Marty and I broadcasted the final episode of the “The Prep Zone” sports show for the 2021-2022 school year.
Among some of the topics on the show we discussed were the FHSAA softball and baseball state tournaments, our upcoming All Area softball and baseball teams, which will be released in less than two weeks online at MainStreetDailyNews.com, plus some of the top sports stories of the year.
It was a great way to end our coverage of high school sports this year. In case you missed it, last week the Dixie County baseball team were our guests.
This past spring, 16 regular season softball and baseball games were broadcast, plus eight postseason games and 13 episodes of “The Prep Zone” from March 9 to June 1. That’s a total of 37 live sports broadcasts over the last 13 weeks for an average of 2.85 live high school broadcasts per week.
That put us well over 120 live high school broadcasts during the 2021-22 school year. Thanks to everyone who was a part of it. We can’t wait to crank things back up again in August.