The Star Tribune's All-Metro honors for high school sports excellence date back to the mid-1980s. We have named All-Metro Players of the Year in several sports and named All-Metro first and second teams for 40 years. Future Miami Hurricane and Dallas Cowboy Steve Walsh of Cretin-Derham Hall was our first football All-Metro Player of the Year in 1984. Early basketball winners were future Gophers stars Kevin Lynch (Bloomington Jefferson, 1987) and Shannon Loeblien (St. Paul Harding, 1990 and 1991). The All-Metro name served us well, and now it's time for a new era.

Goodbye, All-Metro.

Hello, All-Minnesota.

With the Star Tribune's deeper investment this year in coverage of communities across greater Minnesota, and the high school coverage team's new similar commitment to covering student-athletes and teams across our state, the move fits. Readers will see, starting today with our girls and boys All-Minnesota soccer teams, that Star Tribune journalists will select 25 athletes in each team sport from across the state to form these teams. We'll continue to name a Player of the Year, and this young man or woman could live in Ely, Edina, Edgerton, Eagan or anywhere in between.

We hope you like this All-Minnesota change, and perhaps even more so other changes in motion or coming soon. Those include:

  • Our high school sports coverage team has grown. We swiped Nick Williams from the Business coverage team and he now is our high school sports editor. Cassidy Hettesheimer's run as our summer intern sports reporter went so well, we asked her to stay. She said yes, and she's our newest reporter. And longtime columnist Chip Scoggins is adding a new primary focus of high school sports. Readers have responded so well in recent years to Chip's deep dives into topics or subjects rooted in prep sports, and you'll see more of those stories from him while he continues to write columns about the many other teams (Vikings, Gophers and more) and topics in our state.
  • No surprise: This team will produce more coverage than you're used to seeing from us. Those who have asked us to cover high schools more: check, with many more checks to come.
  • You'll see high school sports stories that are topped by bylines from our reporters stationed around Minnesota. Our commitment to statewide preps coverage will show up every week.
  • Next month, we'll debut a stronger lineup of recruiting coverage. College sports reporter Marcus Fuller will lend the preps team some of his time and lead the way on recruiting news coverage and analysis. Every season, young Minnesotans achieve their dreams of signing up to play college sports. We want to celebrate those moments, tell you more about these athletes, their successes and the issues they face in modern high-stakes recruiting.
  • We'll be on Instagram a lot more. (Maybe not quite as often as the teenagers we cover, but we are stepping up our game.) Make sure to follow @stribsports on IG to see new features such as Prep Athletes of the Week videos, top-play highlights and more.
  • You might have noticed free livestreamed games each week on startribune.com, thanks to a partnership with Neighborhood Sports Network. We aim to bring you more streaming options this fall and winter and beyond as well. Keep an eye out for those.
  • And we want to make our 20 different Hubs websites can't-miss destinations for high school sports fans and followers. We've just started on some enhancements, with a lot more on the way. We are polling many Minnesota coaches, too, to see how our Hubs can get better. These Hubs are where you'll find all the scores, stats, schedules and more for every community in Minnesota. Our Prep Stats Team owns the massive chore of collecting and publishing these stats almost every night during the school year, and they'll lead us on improvements to the Hubs, too.

If you have any questions about our new approach, please send me an email at chris.carr@startribune.com. And you can reach our preps coverage team anytime by emailing preps@startribune.com.

Congratulations today to the first wave of All-Minnesota Team student-athletes. You earned that name. It's new, but it fits.