High School Athletics & Exploitation of Athletes
Tuesday, March 12 | 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Hyatt Regency Austin
Hill Country ABCD

As a Southerner [specifically, as a homegrown Texan], I can personally attest to the notion that high school athletics reign supreme over many collegiate and professional competitive sports that are consumed by wide audiences in this region. Find yourself in a large enough district and you won’t be able to avoid the chatter of which football team will take State next season.

Andy Beal, president and founder of MaxPreps.com, the leading online high school sports information destination, understands the dedication and desire for knowledge that parents, students, coaches and sports fans possess when it comes to high school athletics.

Beal founded MaxPreps.com in 2002, though he had been interested in the realm of new media and its relation to sports for almost a decade before MaxPreps.com’s inception.

“I became involved in new media in 1993 when I got the urge to help traditional media companies move their content and their audiences to new media platforms,” Beal said.

Beal began to recognize a market for a new kind of information collection and dissemination format.

“I saw an opportunity to either collaborate or compete,” Beal said. “I did market investigation and saw the results and decided to compete with newspapers.”

Though it has not yet been concretely justified, it is likely that MaxPreps.com is the largest high school athletics database in existence.

MaxPreps.com joined forces with CBSSports.com in 2007.

“Being a part of CBS has been great, and I’m very fortunate to work with Jason Kint at CBSSports.com,” Beal said.

Since MaxPreps’s integration with the aforementioned online media giant, Beal has focused on transitioning the site to a more digitized and mobile platform.

“From a digital standpoint, the biggest evolution has been the rapid movement of our audience to mobile platforms,” Beal said. “Whereas in the past, ending in 1997 or so, it would have been fine to publish from a single desktop platform. Now, we’re able to work from a desktop platform, in addition to a mobile platform and applications.”

The MaxPreps brand additionally differentiates itself from other high school information sources by treating athletes across the board as fairly as possible.

“We focus on every team, every game and every player,” Beal said. “We feature every athlete and we focus on their accomplishments. We think high school sports are a tremendous asset to our culture. Just because you’re not a recruited or featured athlete doesn’t mean your experience was less valuable.”

MaxPreps uses this approach to lessen the possibility of exploitation of particular athletes, which can be detrimental to not only those select few, but all student athletes in some degree.

“What we have to be careful about as a culture is that we don’t undermine the great things that come from youth and high school sports, and that we don’t overly focus on the the exceptional few,” Beal said.

Beal enjoys his work with MaxPreps and CBSSports.com, and feels that he is impacting the world of athletics in some way or another.

“[MaxPreps is] an opportunity to change the world in some small way,” Beal said. “Traditionally, high school sports were only of local interest. What we’re doing is creating a national platform and allowing anyone to view and enjoy what’s going on with any team. And I think that’s really kind of novel.”

Beal will have additional speakers providing insight during his panel discussion at SXSW Interactive.

“I’ve got some great guests who are joining me,” Beal said. “Trevor Moawad is a mental conditioning coach, and he works closely with Alabama football and [Head] Coach Nick Saban.”

“Also on the panel is Peter Ruppe who’s with WinForever, which is a company that does terrific work with helping young people with positive self affirmations,” Beal said. “Peter works closely with [Head Coach] Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks.”

Beal hopes that attendees will leave the discussion with applicable insight into the world of young athletes and the challenges they must face and overcome.

“Interacting with the audience is going to be special,” Beal said. “I think it will be an interesting experience of seeing young athletes when exploitation has been damaging, and also situations where the athletes have capitalized on exploitation appropriately.”