Football Preview Magazine Coming
By Bonita Wilborn
The much anticipated 6th annual Mountain River Valley Football Preview Magazine, coming soon, will be yet another first, for our loyal readers, as we will now be including all of the high schools, with football teams, in both DeKalb and Jackson counties.
Our first Football Preview Magazine came out in 2014. While other media outlets were publishing a football preview of sorts, ours was the first of its kind in this area. Any attention to the upcoming football season came in the form of articles in the newspaper about new coaches and schedules for the upcoming year. However, the Mountain Valley News 2014 Football Preview set the bar, in this area, with a 66 page, full-color magazine that included not only individual shots of each player on each team but also group photos of the coaching staff and the cheerleading squad from each school. It also included highlights from the coaches about anticipation for the upcoming season and articles about the local sports hall of greats.
The 2014 Football Preview Magazine proved to be very popular, so we kept the same format for the 2015 edition, but in 2016 we added full-color backgrounds [the individual school colors] on the individual photo pages and added feature player interviews for each school.
The 2017 Football Preview Magazine saw yet another positive addition as feature cheerleader, and mascot interviews were also included. The 2018 Football Preview Magazine continued that format and also brought back to life the famed “Bum Pickins”, a much-loved character that wrote for the Weekly Post, which is a former publication from the Rainsville area.
More improvements are on the horizon for the 2019 Football Preview Magazine that is coming out near the end of August (at the beginning of the 2019 football season). This year’s edition will have textured backgrounds and will be the first edition to carry the name Mountain River Valley Football Preview.
The reason for the name change is due to the addition of our secondary newspaper, North Jackson Press, that we started printing in February 2019. While the previous Football Preview Magazines have included Pisgah, Section, and North Sand Mountain high schools, all from Jackson County, we are very excited to be including North Jackson, Woodville, and Scottsboro high schools in this year’s edition. That brings the total number of schools in this year’s magazine to 16: Collinsville, Cornerstone Christian Academy, Crossville, Fort Payne, Fyffe, Geraldine, Ider, North Jackson, North Sand Mountain, Pisgah, Plainview, Scottsboro, Section, Sylvania, Valley Head, and Woodville. (Skyline does not have a football team.)
With the addition of the other Jackson County Schools, available space has made it necessary to eliminate the player, cheerleader, and mascot interviews, but we will still have the ever-popular coach interviews.
I know you will be as excited as we are to get your copy of the 2019 Football Preview Magazine, and will want to put it back as a memento for your child or grandchild. As always, the magazines that we publish are free to our subscribers. Just be looking for the announcement in the newspaper that the magazine is back, then stop by one of our offices and get your copy before we run out. Our Rainsville office is located at 450 Main Street West (directly across the street from the Tech School), and the Stevenson office is located at 42950 Hwy 72 Suite 406 (in the Foodland Shopping Center). If you are not yet a subscriber, the cost for the magazine is $5 each.
The cost for a 6-month subscription (August – February when our subscriptions come due again) is $15/57¢ per copy (or $12/48¢ per copy, for senior citizen rate). While you’re at one of our offices to pick up your magazine, you could subscribe to have the newspaper delivered to your home for almost half the newsstand price and still get the Football Preview Magazine free.