Dave Nichols: Please allow me to introduce myself

So this is a bit terrifying.

Imagine if you will, in your line of work, being hired by a 130-year-old company to replace an employee that had held your position for 32-plus years and had become an icon in the industry and community.

Daunting, right?

This is my life.

I’m the new preps writer for The Spokesman-Review. We haven’t had a “new guy” here since Greg Lee started in 1984 – the year before I graduated from high school.

Greg departs the S-R with a lifetime of institutional knowledge of prep sports in Spokane and North Idaho. You don’t just replace a guy like that.

I can only hope to be fair, accurate and thorough – and, I hope, interesting and/or enlightening at some point – and build relationships with area athletic directors, coaches and administrators as quickly as possible to ensure the most complete coverage of preps sports.

The biggest relationship I need to cultivate, though, is with you – our readers.

I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with a few of you already – and I encourage anyone to reach out with comments, suggestions, questions – or concerns. But please let me take a few moments of your time to introduce myself.

A few things about me:

1) I’m not from here. I’m from the other Washington – D.C. that is – and sports writing and editing is a second career for me after 20-plus years in legal support.

2) I covered pro sports in D.C. for eight years before relocating to this area with my wife, who is from here (Coeur d’Alene, to be exact).

3) I covered college sports for the Associated Press here in Spokane for a couple of years and have been filling various duties on the sports page at the paper – including prep roundups – since 2014.

So I may be new to the beat, but I’m not new to the business or to the Spokesman.

A change in regime brings an opportunity for reflection. There’s an old expression: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But with every aspect of life, change is growth and growth is good.

The content of our preps coverage is pretty darn great to start with. And while it would be easy enough to just come in and maintain status quo, I think there are some things – especially in the presentation – we could be doing in a more modern and efficient manner.

To that end, over time we will be implementing some changes to how we present our preps coverage – both in print and online. We want to give you even more of what makes preps sports great, using every delivery method we have possible.

Some changes will be subtle, some not so much. But we think you’ll really like what we have in store.

The goal is to provide a better, more consistent product while working within the parameters of the industry and market. We have plans to give you more high school sports in the paper, presented in a manner that will be “destination” reading.

And I want to take this opportunity to remind you to follow our preps coverage online as well as in print.

On a daily basis, we take calls and emails from your coaches with the scores and stats of each game, then write a game recap and publish them individually on NWPrepsNow.com.

You can search that page by game, school, league, standings … if you haven’t visited NWPrepsNow.com in a while I hope you’ll rediscover the wealth of information that’s available there.

Once all the individual recaps have posted, we will publish a nightly roundup by sport in the High School Sports collection on Spokesman.com.

Then the next day we’ll put out a “morning preps roundup,” highlighting the best of the action around the region – including links to all the previous night’s roundups for your ease of reference.

I hope you’ll bookmark that page (spokesman.com/high-school-sports/) for daily access to all our prep coverage.

All of this is in addition to the daily agate, plus the profile and feature stories we will continue to publish on Thursday’s preps page, as well as breaking news stories when applicable.

Lastly, I can’t do this job without your input.

If you have suggestions for a student-athlete at your school to be highlighted or featured, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Coaches and administrators are a great resource, but nobody knows your kids like you do.

Thanks for indulging me and having patience with me as I get my feet wet in the beat here. I’m really looking forward to sharing the stories these players have to tell.

When covering the pros, and colleges really for that matter, it’s all about wins, losses and statistics – and money, unfortunately.

What makes high school sports great are the kids that play them.