Your community used to show up because they knew about the game. The local paper ran the preview, the morning announcements reminded students, and word spread through the parking lot after practice. That pipeline is gone — and it didn't disappear slowly. It collapsed.
Today, your Friday night football game is competing for the same attention as Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, and every college and pro sports account your students follow. The question isn't whether your program is good enough to deserve attention. It's whether you're doing anything to earn it in a world where attention is the scarcest resource there is.
This post breaks down what the attention economy actually means, why it matters specifically for high school athletics, and what you can start doing about it this week.
When The attention economy is a simple concept: as the amount of content in the world has exploded, the one thing that hasn't grown is human attention. There are still only 24 hours in a day, and every app, platform, brand, and creator is fighting for a slice of each person's waking hours.
This isn't a marketing theory. It's the operating reality of every person in your community. Your students, their parents, your alumni, and your boosters are all swimming in a constant stream of content — and they're making split-second decisions about what gets their attention and what gets scrolled past.
For decades, high school athletics didn't have to think about this. Community attention flowed to your programs naturally through local newspaper coverage, word of mouth, and the simple fact that there weren't many competing options on a Friday night. That era is over.
Now your program sits in the same attention marketplace as ESPN, Barstool Sports, your local college's NIL content machine, and whatever creator your students are watching on YouTube right now. You're not just competing with other high schools. You're competing with everything.
The The scale of the attention shift is hard to overstate. Here's what the data shows:
Screen time dominates daily life. American adults spend an average of nearly 7 hours per day consuming media across TV, smartphones, computers, and tablets, according to recent Nielsen data. For teenagers, the numbers are even higher — U.S. teens average more than 7 hours of daily screen time, and a Gallup survey found that the average teen spends 4.8 hours per day on social media apps alone.
Teens are online constantly. A Pew Research Center survey found that nearly half of U.S. teenagers say they are online "almost constantly." That's not an exaggeration — it's a measured response from the people sitting in your student section (or not sitting there, as the case may be).
Local media coverage has evaporated. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, according to Northwestern University's Medill State of Local News report. The U.S. now has 213 news desert counties — places with zero local news coverage — and another 1,524 counties with only one remaining news source. Approximately 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news.
That sports reporter who used to cover your games, write player features, and run your scores in the Monday paper? In most communities, that person no longer exists. The local coverage pipeline that used to deliver attention to your program has dried up — and nothing has automatically replaced it.
Your students and families are spending their attention online, engaging with their favorite sports teams, athletes, entertainers, and creators. Your program is in that same marketplace now. The only question is whether you're showing up in it.
Here's the direct impact: things that used to happen automatically for your program now require deliberate effort.
Attendance doesn't market itself. When the newspaper ran a game preview, it reached thousands of households. That free marketing is gone. If you're not telling your community about your games through digital channels, many of them simply won't know about them.
Recognition doesn't echo without amplification. A great season, a record-breaking performance, a conference championship — these achievements used to get picked up and amplified by local reporters. Now, if you don't tell the story yourself, it might not get told at all. That affects recruiting, community pride, and the culture you're building inside your program.
Your brand exists whether you manage it or not. Every school has a digital presence — the question is whether you're shaping it or letting it shape itself. The programs that feel like they're thriving are almost always the ones that have taken control of their own narrative online. The ones that feel like they're fading? They're usually the ones waiting for someone else to tell their story.
The programs winning in this environment haven't hired full-time marketing directors. They've made a decision: storytelling is a system in our department, not something we do when we have time. That shift in mindset — from "it would be nice to post more" to "this is part of how we run our program" — is the single biggest differentiator.
If you want to see what it looks like when an athletic department takes the attention economy seriously, look at Green Level High School in Cary, North Carolina.
Green Level opened its doors in 2019 with no traditions, no alumni base, and no athletic history. Every other school in their conference had decades of community identity built up. Green Level had a blank slate — which meant they had to build attention from scratch.
Under Athletic Director Colin Fegeley, Green Level built a three-pillar brand strategy: consistent social media content, a monthly newsletter called Swamp Stories, and a deliberate on-campus brand experience. None of these required a massive budget. They required a system.
The results speak for themselves. Green Level's social accounts have generated over 1 million additional impressions since implementing their strategy. Their X (formerly Twitter) account averages more than 50,000 profile visits and 450,000 impressions per month — numbers that steadily increase month over month.
What Green Level proves isn't that you need to be a social media expert. It's that consistency — showing up with branded, quality content on a regular schedule — signals excellence to your community. When families see a program that looks professional and tells its story well, they assume the program itself is run that way. And they're usually right.
You don't need a marketing degree or a content team to start competing in the attention economy. You need a system. Here are three steps to build one:
Don't try to do everything. Start with the content types that are easiest to produce and most valuable to your audience. Three strong options for most programs:
Pick two or three of these and commit to posting them consistently. Consistency beats creativity every time. A program that posts three solid graphics a week will build more visibility than one that posts a viral video once a month and then goes silent.
If content creation lives on your personal to-do list, it will always be the first thing that gets dropped when the week gets busy. Build it into the department's workflow instead. Assign roles. Set a posting calendar. Make it something that happens as part of the weekly rhythm, like submitting eligibility paperwork or updating the schedule board.
Some ADs delegate to a student media team. Others split responsibilities across assistant coaches. The method matters less than the commitment — someone is responsible for this, and it happens every week regardless of the season.
The number one reason content doesn't get posted is time. You're running a department, managing coaches, handling compliance, and dealing with everything else that lands on your desk. You need tools that make content creation fast — not one more thing that takes an hour.
Start with one platform done well. Instagram or X tends to be where high school sports communities are most active. Use a tool like Gipper that lets you create branded, professional graphics in minutes rather than hours. The goal is to remove the friction so that posting feels like part of the job, not a side project.
The attention economy describes a world where human attention is the scarcest resource, because the volume of content competing for it has grown exponentially. For high school sports, this means your program is no longer guaranteed community visibility. With local newspaper coverage declining and families spending 7+ hours per day on screens, athletic departments have to actively compete for attention through digital content — or risk becoming invisible to their own communities.
U.S. teenagers average more than 7 hours of daily screen time across all devices, according to recent research. A Gallup survey found that teens spend an average of 4.8 hours per day on social media apps specifically. A Pew Research Center survey from 2024 found that nearly half of all teens describe themselves as being online "almost constantly."
The primary driver is the collapse of local newspapers. Over 3,200 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2005, and the country now has 213 counties with no local news coverage at all. The sports reporters who once covered high school games, wrote player profiles, and published scores have largely disappeared. This means athletic programs can no longer rely on earned media to keep their communities informed and engaged.
The most effective approach is to treat content as a system, not a side project. Pick 2–3 content types (game results, athlete spotlights, schedule updates), build posting into your department's weekly routine, and use tools that reduce creation time. Consistency is more important than production quality — a program that shows up reliably with branded content will build more visibility than one that posts sporadically.
Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) tend to be the most effective platforms for high school athletic departments, because that's where students, parents, and local sports communities are most active. Start with one platform and do it well before expanding to others. The key is consistent, branded content that tells your program's story — not trying to be everywhere at once.