HobbsDailyReport.com is coordinated and authored by Newton native Chris Hobbs, the most experienced sports journalist in the Greater Hickory area. This will be the 43rd consecutive school year he has been on the beat in the region.
As a new school year fast approaches, we’re currently looking for area businesses that would like to show support for individual schools or high school sports overall or Lenoir-Rhyne University sports or generally all sports in the region.
HobbsDailyReport.com is a free website devoted to local sports coverage rather than a site that sells subscriptions to those interested in reading its content. In order to provide it for free, advertising is sold.
Ad packages and rates are available by emailing Hobbs at hobbsdailyreport@gmail.com (information will be promptly returned for your review), and there are a large variety of ad sizes, placements, etc., available.
HobbsDailyReport will feature a single page for each of the 23 high schools that will play in the new South Fork 2A, Northwestern Foothills 2A and the revamped Northwestern 3A-4A.
When an item or story is posted on the site’s front page, it will automatically be inventoried on the school page as well, available for review at any time, and the page will have current (and historical) information about each school on its own highly focused page.
Hobbs’ extensive reporting files — spanning nearly 40 years of results, records and general knowledge — provides information that, for the most part, exists nowhere else.
Here are the schools you will be able to follow on HobbsDailyReport.com:
South Fork 2A: Bandys, East Lincoln, Lake Norman Charter, Lincolnton, Maiden, Newton-Conover, North Lincoln and West Lincoln.
Northwestern Foothills 2A: Bunker Hill, Draughn, East Burke, Fred T. Foard, Hibriten, Patton, West Iredell.
Northwestern 3A-4A: Alexander Central, Freedom, Hickory, St. Stephens, Watauga, West Caldwell, McDowell, South Caldwell.
Other site features will include:
HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL: The site will continue to have many of the mainstays and most popular reads written by Hobbs, from preseason football and statistics – just ahead, as football season is a month or so away — to game blurbs on or by Friday mornings on all of the games scheduled in the region, plus game results, standings (varsity and junior varsity). In general, the things you’ve been accustomed to seeing in Hobbs’ work spanning 40-plus years will be a part of HobbsDailyReport.com.
HIGH SCHOOL SCORES (coming in August): Sponsored by Burke Mortuary, it’s the page you’ll be able to visit to find results on a daily/nightly basis and a daily prep schedule and much more. The page will carry results from all sports – not just football – as they are reported to the site by the high schools.
HIGH SCHOOL STANDINGS: Always current standings in football, all games, and standings in all other varsity sports (conference only) — volleyball, wrestling, baseball, softball, soccer… your way to follow what is really happening and better understand who is winning and where the key games or matches are going to be played.
HIGH SCHOOL SCHEDULES: Varsity football schedules for all 23 schools have been on the site for about three weeks, courtesy of Dwayne Wilson Insurance and Financial Services, whose support helped launch HobbsDailyReport.com. The site will gather varsity schedules for each sport at each of the high schools and centrally locate them on a page as well as have them on school pages.
BLAST FROM THE PAST: The page where Hobbs, an award-winning writer whose recognition includes being named the North Carolina High School Athletic Association (NCHSAA) Media Person of the Year in 1992, will share thoughts and memories from a career that began in the late 1970s and that will soon span six different decades.
His experience includes nearly 14 years at a large metro newspaper, where he focused on Piedmont North Carolina high schools but was also involved in coverage of college basketball (including the Final Four), and football, the NFL (including the Panthers’ first season and game), and as sports editor of three mid-sized newspapers and assistant sports editor of another Western N.C. newspaper.
Hobbs’ experience level of 43 years makes him the reporter in North Carolina with the second-longest active tenure of being focused primarily on high school coverage — behind Fayetteville’s Earl Vaughn — and he’s No. 1 in that regard in Western North Carolina.
THINGS YOU WANT TO SEE: If you have news or a story idea, write to Hobbs at hobbsdailyreport@gmail.com. The site will always be looking for good stories and trying to get to as much news and features as a 1-man staff can provide.
