The debut Tuesday of our colorful new high school preps page and our accompanying Web site has been in the works for several months and credit goes to the hard work of our dedicated sports and online staffs, who realize that high school sports is nothing short of an obsession for some of our readers.

We've done an admirable job of covering preps in the past, but committing to a special site and running at least one dedicated page six days a week (Tuesday through Sunday) requires a team that understands the time and effort that parents, coaches, school officials — and 33,000 student-athletes — spend on interscholastic sports.

The vision of Sports Editor Curtis Murayama is to have a home for every major sport, although he knows that the more coverage we provide, the more readers will demand and that sports we haven't covered on a regular basis will be in greater demand. He also knows that the page and the site are a work in progress and he has plans for making it even better, especially this fall when football season starts.

We've started out with scores, stories, game highlights, schedules, standings, statistics, player profiles, photos, trivia and our popular Homegrown Report. Online we have videos, blogs, photo galleries, weekly polls and all-stars.

Eventually we will provide individual statistics for players and our wish is to provide a biography and photo of every athlete. We'll also have videos of championship games, athletes of the week and interactive tools allowing readers to submit photos and be part of story chats. We already have started producing videos from referees explaining the most misunderstood rules of basketball. We will be expanding those explanations to include other sports.

We are especially pleased to be partnering with OC16 and the Hawai'i High School Athletic Association in this endeavor. OC16 will provide us video highlights from each night's games and Dave Vinton, OC16's sports manager, is writing a blog. In turn, we will publicize OC16's games each night. We will continue our special relationship with the Hawai'i High School Athletic Association and executive director Keith Amemiya as we share information, stories and state tournament results.

Our preps team is impressive, starting with Wes Nakama, who loves writing about high school sports and writes a popular blog. He will handle most of the print duties along with reporter Kyle Sakamoto. They will be joined by Stacy Kaneshiro who will contribute football and occasional baseball coverage. Leila Wai, a whiz at shooting and editing video, will provide most of the video entries and continue to write stories. Our online staff will consistent of Stanley Lee and Kalani Takase. They will update scores and schedules and manage rosters and their handiwork will appear in print.

Why such a push for high school sports?

Many reasons, but mainly we would like to be the center of interest for all things in high school sports and provide a repository for those on the Mainland looking to recruit from here. Since we are so isolated, it's important that we tout the sports talents of our fine youth, just as we do for those who do well in the academic world. Maybe all this will lead to some college scholarships.

Murayama sees the print and online efforts "eventually growing to the point that it fulfills the needs and interests of our readers and becomes the place to go for high school information and interaction."

But the success of the page and the site will come from those intimately involved with high school sports as we seek any information they can provide.

"We'll need big-time cooperation from coaches and statisticians to make this work," Murayama said. "We rely on student statisticians to call in results in a timely manner so games can be published in the print edition. Coaches and administrators will need to keep us alerted with changes in schedules."

Parents can help us by alerting us to stories and when we have our "Get Published" feature up and running, to send us stories, photographs and video.

Certainly this is an Advertiser project but as Murayama sees it, it should really be the property of every high school athlete in every sport.

"We want to make this something the state can be proud of," he said. "We have only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish."