By CHRIS LYKINS

Internet Beat

High School Football in Guadalupe County: Friday Night Blitz at the Seguin Gazette

The Internet has changed many things in recent years from how we balance our checkbook to how we communicate with our family and friends half a world away.

It has also changed life for the sports fan which now has easy access from the latest NFL scores to the Cricket standings for a league that plays halfway around the globe.

The Gazette-Enterprise Web site is once again pitching in to help the local sports fan this year with a special site devoted to all four county high school football teams.

This is the third straight year that we have done this and it really is my pet project every year. It's undergone its standard redesign facelift, with a wider look to allow for additional information to be easily accessible to the fan. It's color coordinated with the school colors for each of the area teams.

It also underwent a name change this year. For the last two seasons the site had been called Groundzero but given September 11 and the meaning that word came to have in the days and weeks after those horrific events we settled on a sports term going with Friday Night Blitz. The new site can be found at http://blitz.seguingazette.com and offers photos from each of the four teams (Seguin, Clemens, Marion and Navarro) as well as a scoreboard from around the county updated quarter by quarter, a player of the week, a spotlight game and touchdown leaders from around the area.

On the scoreboard for each team, there is a link that leads you deeper into the site with a special page devoted to each team that includes game stories, pviews, statistics, photos, schedule as well as a look ahead at the next opponent.

Because of the nature of the Internet and the fact that it's never off, running a wide-ranging site like Blitz is a busy job on Friday nights. All our staff and correspondents and photographers head out to the games armed with cell phones and a plan. Breaking news and scores are phoned in and the site is updated throughout the evening and then uploaded to our servers.

After the games the crew gets back into their cars and heads back from cities and small towns all over the area to file the stories at the G-E and develop the film that will provide the photographs.

While a lot of our photo work can be done digitally, shooting the speeds required for high school football, particularly in low light situations, calls for camera equipment that run into the thousands of dollars. Put that up against a standard film camera with a decent lens and a strong flash and there really is no contest at this point.

As the clock ticks toward midnight the puzzle pieces start coming together as the photos are scanned and writers wrap up their work. I start putting up the new stories, swapping out the photos on the site and start laying the groundwork for next week's changes.

The last thing we do for the night -before shutting down the lights and leaving- is to talk about the player of the week. The correspondents who cover each of the teams come in and pitch an idea and we wrangle until we reach a consensus. The player of the week is always the last thing we do.

The site is a lot of work, but it's also a lot of fun and area fans seem to enjoy it, particularly those alumni from out of town or those who can't make the road trip to follow their favorite team.

If we can make some rabid high school football fans happy at the end of the night it's all worth it.

Chris Lykins is the online editor for the Gazette-Enterprise in Seguin and can be reached at web@seguingazette.com

To contribute to the Internet Beat column, contact Gloria Rivera at webmaster@seguin.net. Links to past Internet Beat articles since 1996, are available at http://www.seguin.net/intbeat.html.