Kicking Off the 26-27 Season
It's a busy slate of games around the state!
Football season is here!
The bulk of the teams around the state kick off football season on Friday, but there's a couple of games today. Falmouth and Kennebunk face off in a rematch of a classic from last year and the defending B champs from Westbrook start their title defense against Cheverus.
Westbrook's title, much like Falmouth's before them, came as a surprise to anyone who wasn't bleeding Blazes blue, so I invited coach Sam Johnson on the podcast to talk about their meteoric rise and the groundwork that was laid years before.
It looks like the rain might clear up before the game today. I'm probably heading down (weather permitting).
I didn't really have enough for a full newsletter earlier this week, so I'm a little behind on plugging the podcasts. Hopefully, you've been staying caught up, but if you haven't, Jay Baines and I went over the way-too-early basketball preseason polls. We recorded this in May and since it wasn't super timely, I held on to it (maybe too long!)
The downside of it is stuff has happened between now and then that would absolutely swing the polling, but those are the breaks.
As always, be sure to subscribe on YouTube.
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The schedules are all pulled and hopefully accurate (ha!)
You can check your team's schedule on their team page. Here, for example, is Cape soccer.
If you're a local business (or super fan), I'm making ads available on team pages. Your business banner ad can sit on the top of all of the team pages for a specific school for the entire school year. It's a great way to reach people in your community and support this website. A win-win!
Lucas McNelly
The NBA finally finished their investigation of the Clippers and, much to the surprise of almost anyone, the League hammered the team. The Clippers lost 5 first round picks, Steve Ballmer got a 1 year suspension, Uncle Dennis was banned for 5 years. It's a massive penalty and a huge loss for ESPN's "reporting" just a couple of weeks ago that the League had found nothing wrong. Turns out when you fire all your real journalists and give the money to a punter, you get embarrassed.
Ryan Glasspiegel
They'll learn nothing from this, I'm sure.
The Clippers are beyond screwed. This is being called a "Death Penalty" across the League and it's entirely their fault. All Kawhi had to do was plant a couple trees! Do an Instagram post!
An interesting side impact of this punishment is that while the Clippers figure to be very bad for quite a long time, the Celtics have their 2028 first round pick from the Jaylen trade and that is suddenly looking like a very, very good pick.
Ben Handler
Aden Jeffers is in the running to be the subject of an ad in Sports Illustrated, but he needs your vote. Voting ends today.
The start of the season means it's time for season previews and Michael Hoffer has a series of novellas you can check out at the indispensable Hoffer's High School Sports (subscribe!).
Michael Hoffer
Front Office Sports has an interesting article about the rise of the content creators on the high school sports sidelines.
“Basically anyone with a cellphone” can now identify themselves as media and find a way onto the field at some schools, says Matt Stepp, a Texas high school football journalist of two decades. He began noticing an uptick in nontraditional media at games in 2021, when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on sideline access were lifted, and NIL went into effect at the NCAA level.
In Arizona, the trend has become so pronounced that Seth Polansky, director of media services at the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA), tells FOS he and his colleagues have coined a term for it: the “pajama paparazzi.”
First off, "pajama paparazzi" is an objectively funny term.
There's a couple of ways to look at this. People have made the point that it's a great way to get real world filming experience, but there's a million ways to do that and you don't need to be at a game. You could do it really anywhere or at any level.
There is undoubtedly an influx of people on the sidelines who aren't traditional media. And I realize that some would consider me part of the problem here, so we can just acknowledge that and set it aside. For every Brady King there's a dozen kids who are...not Brady King and don't exactly know what they're doing out there and do things like walk on the field or court during timeouts. It's not great.
What you're going to see, starting now, is schools codifying some rules and guidelines. The MPA has already tightened their guidelines for Tourney Week and I wouldn't be surprised if they go further.
Ellyn Briggs
Troy Barnies has signed on for year 16 of his pro career.
Year 16!
— Troy Barnies (@TroyBarnies) September 1, 2026
…and what better place than in my second home, Norway 🇳🇴🏀🦁 pic.twitter.com/qRB2tH8qre
There's spreads for every game tomorrow, with the usual caveat that all of the information is entirely based on last year's numbers. So take that with a grain of salt.
Anyway, this is just to give you an idea of what it'll look like going forward.
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.