Hot Pursuit

The Steele County Times has hit a touchdown of its own this fall sports season.
Now that we’re half way through the fall sports season, I want to highlight a little bit of the magic that has been going on at the Times.
We launched a special section called “Front Row Football” at the beginning of the season in August. Each week we are dedicating nearly eight pages to high school football involving the four Steele County teams. It’s something that has never been done before in this region. 
The Times made a commitment to covering every football game this season with Blooming Prairie, Owatonna, Medford and New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva. 
There is something special about Friday night football in Minnesota. That’s why we felt it was important to capture all the prep football action in a unique way. 
During a planning session earlier this year, our editorial team conceived the idea of a special football section. And then county sports editor James Knoop ran with the idea and got the plan into action. He enlisted the help of veteran sports writer LeMar Nelson as well as other members of our editorial team. 
Our goal has been to provide fans with a front row seat to all of the action on the gridirons across the area this fall. We are often limited with what we can get in on our regular sports pages that we felt more space was needed. 
It has been a mighty ambitious projects for a newspaper our size to take on. But it’s well worth the extra effort. We recognize the importance of high school sports, and especially prep football, plays in our communities. We want to have a vehicle to highlight and showcase what our young athletes do each and every week. 
We invite you to sit back and enjoy Front Row Football each week. Now we’re hoping all of our Steele County teams will make it into post-season play and bring home some hardware. 
I hope you’ll agree that this special endeavor is another reason why we’ve become the local choice when it comes to hometown news and sports coverage. 
Back to the action. It’s time for us to go in hot pursuit of some more front row action on the football fields.