Mascot Monthly: New Magazine to Change the Face of High School Sports

Next month, a new magazine will be hitting your mailboxes. Mascot Monthly, a full color sports magazine, will connect local school athletics to their communities, beginning with Hamilton Southeastern. The Mascot Monthly will reach over 16,000 people every month through direct mailing to every HSE school district home as well as free distribution at the games.

“My initial reaction was that this could be unbelievable to promote HSE Athletics,” said Greg Habegger, athletic director at HSE. “It’s been interesting to me in this office that people in this day and age get their news in different ways. Obviously they can go to their phones and look up Twitter or look up a website. Instantly I thought this is going to fill a void that people are looking for.”

With 3,000 students, it can be easy for athletes to be lost in the crowd, especially in smaller sports. There are so many students with stories that never get shared – the female wrestler, the freshman that runs half marathons, the sophomore from Japan that plays baseball because it reminds him of his life back home. Mascot Monthly is a place for these stories, regardless of whether they are the senior football star or the freshman lacrosse newbie.

“Something that we believe in as an athletic department is we never use the phrase ‘major and minor sports.’ To those athletes and to those parents and grandmas and grandpas, they’re all major, and they should be,” said Jim Self, co-athletic director at HSE. “I sometimes think when you look at local newspapers, basketball and football are covered really well. But we’re really proud of all of our sports. We’ve got kids doing great things in all of our sports, and sometimes that’s hard to get that message out there, what kids are accomplishing in some of our other sports that aren’t basketball and football.”

Mascot Monthly will feature student athletes, their coaches, their fans and their teams. The magazine will also function as a program at sporting events. From the publishers of the TownePost Network as well as former Indianapolis Colts Marketing Director and sports columnist Ray Compton, Mascot Monthly will share stories through print, video and social media.

“The Mascot is different because it will be the first monthly publication dedicated only to a high school’s sports activities. It will be the hyper local journalism that we have been doing for 11 years but put into the high school setting,” said TownePost and Mascot Monthly publisher Tom Britt. “We can provide really good content in a very well-defined market that is not being served at all right now.”

Mascot Monthly will benefit the school not only promotionally, but financially. Thousands of dollars from advertising will go straight back to the athletic department with $100 donated for every advertisement.

“We couldn’t be more excited about the potential of working with Mascot. We think that it is going to promote athletics in our community beyond what we can even imagine. We see people getting excited about athletics that maybe didn’t even realize what all went on here. I am amazed that there are still people who don’t know we have 19 sports or state-level competitors in all our sports,” said Habegger. “We are just excited for the opportunity for people to open up a mailer and see what is going on here. Maybe that means that they will come to a game, buy a ticket, buy some concessions and be a part of what we are doing here.”

For more information, visit mascotmonthly.com.