The start of another year brings the anticipation of fall sports, the changing of the seasons and opportunities to look back and reminisce about our experiences. The AIA, seven years ago created The Sollenberger Classic to remember Barry Sollenberger, a co-worker, publisher and most importantly a friend. I remember seeing him in the office and how excited he was about discovering a new piece of history and/or an article bringing out a story from 60 or 70 years ago related to a certain school or student-athlete. Constantly looking back, Barry reminded us that our history is as important as the present and the future.

As for the present, this year the AIA, in our continued efforts to promote our students, has partnered with MaxPreps and brought Jose Garcia on board. Jose, joining Don Ketchum and Les Willsey as our AIA365.com journalists, will provide the most comprehensive multimedia coverage of high school sports in our state, at no charge.  Through AIA365.com and MaxPreps, the AIA has created a state of the art platform allowing coaches and fans the utility to place and find the content they want from video to stats, all in one place.

As for the future, AIA365.com will continue to offer opportunities for the schools to create and display content from their own school page and aggregate the content in one place. We will continue to provide the media, through or platform, stats powered by AIA365.com and MaxPreps. In addition, the AZPreps365 radio call-in show can continued to be heard live on Arizona Sports 620AM every Saturday from 9-11 a.m., and we hope to make that statewide through our partnership with ArizonaSports.com and Skyview Communications. The future developments on AIA365.com and our AZ Preps365 show will allow us an opportunity to promote our 100 year history.

I think Barry likes what we are doing and where we are going. Please join us at University of Phoenix Stadium on Saturday, August 18 for two great games, in celebrating Barry, the start of a new year and most importantly the students and their stories.  For more information on the games, including tickets, click here.