As area baseball teams an summer league teams are putting away their gear for the season, we find ourselves on the cusp of another fall sports season.

Whenever fall rolls around, there is always a sense of renewed hope in the air. All of the incoming freshman athletes are either nervous or ecstatic about the chance to compete at the high school level, the sophomores and juniors are hoping to make the leap and take their games to a new level, and seniors are going to have to starting accepting the reality that this year will be the last time they go out and compete with their friends that they’ve grown up with and known for most of their lives.

The special thing about high school sports is it truly is a community event. All are welcome in the stands and kids are out their playing for their parents, their friends, their neighbors and their teachers. Those same community members are in the crowds cheering for kids that they may have known for a long time, or maybe they just know the kid from seeing them at the grocery store every week.

I’ve written before that I think high school sports are the purest form of competition we have and I still firmly believe it.

There is a special magic to high school sports and I still haven’t grown tired of watching it as I enter my 12th year as sports editor of the Austin Daily Herald. Eleven years on the job is quite a long time and it means the current senior classes were first graders when I came to town and started covering area sports in the fall of 2007. It really ages oneself to see different generations pass through, but it also keeps me connected to a community I’ve come to belong in.

After stops in North Dakota, Wisconsin and South Dakota in my past, it is now apparent that Minnesota is my home. Both of my children know Austin as their hometown and my seven-year old son has even begun to dream about playing basketball for the Packers. I’m sure he’ll get to some games this year and I’m sure he’ll watch on in awe, much as I did when I was a young kid growing up in North Dakota. To me, the Hatton Flyers varsity basketball team, might has well have been the Los Angeles Lakers. The players towered over me in the hallways and they could do things on the court that I could never dream of.

That connection between high school athletes and elementary or middle school kids is certainly a unique bond. It’s one of the things that keeps high school sports sacred and it’s one of the things that keeps me loving this job.

So as you go out to watch of compete in high school sports this fall, be sure to embrace every second of it. it doesn’t last forever.