This has been done for a couple of reasons, but one of them is that it’s a way for fans of our major two contributors, Ronnie Flores and Harold Abend, to more directly show them some appreciation for the work they do on behalf of boys and girls basketball high school teams, players and coaches for many, many years.
Leaving a tip for someone who has a job writing and/or editing stories about high school sports may not be the same as tipping a delivery driver or a food server or many others who do service jobs. But for those of us at Cal-Hi Sports it’s not a job. It’s been part of our life for more than 45 years and while for many of those years it was part of a job within the framework of Student Sports Inc. or ESPN, for the last nine years it’s not been like that.
All tips left through this button through Sunday, May 7 will directly go to our longtime boys basketball analyst Ronnie Flores. This was another great season of work by Ronnie on our site. CLICK HERE to support Ronnie.
We’ve had to keep going with a CalHiSports.com website and have had to keep it operating mostly through subscriptions. A model with 100 percent free content supported by advertising just is not in our DNA. We write, edit and compile lists, rankings and records in five sports and that’s still what we prefer to do with as much of our time as possible. Advertisers can be served and we have done that over the years. The subscription model was just something we knew how to do from the time we spent in the 2000s building a high school network at Rivals.com.
This brings us to 2023 and it’s not that adding a tip button is going to be something we need to work for us to keep going. We’re just hoping it can add just a little extra to the subscriptions already coming in and that have been growing at the levels they were before the pandemic.
The way in which our tip button has been set up on PayPal also will enable us to promote special tipping days and weekends so that every tip that comes in during a particular period of time can be tracked and then given to a particular person. For us, that means we hope a few extra dollars for Ronnie and Harold.
As mentioned in the intro to the tip button when someone hits it, giving us a tip also may be a preferable way for someone to show appreciation for our work for all these years without becoming a subscriber and having a monthly or quarterly or yearly charge hitting a credit card. This group of people would include parents of graduating seniors or coaches who are retiring.
Cal-Hi Sports has been providing state rankings, state records, all-state teams and more in five sports for more than 40 years. For more than 20 years, we’ve also been working with Ronnie as our partner for boys basketball and with Harold for girls basketball. They are now covering players with NIL deals that will all earn a lot more money than they or us will ever make. That’s fine. None of us do this for the money. Still, it would be nice to know we’re appreciated and leaving us a tip is just another way to do that.
