The Central Coast Section and others across California will have to pay up or find a new way to seed their football teams in 2025.
HSRatings.com, formerly known as Calpreps, announced this summer that it will charge consumers for its content for the first time. The website has been a critical component of section seeding determinations by the Central Coast Section, among others across the state of California, for a few years.
Now, those sections will either have to pay the piper or go back to the drawing board.
“It’s certainly something that we’re going to have to discuss as a section with our football committee,” CCS commissioner Dave Grissom told the Bay Area News Group.
The website, a classic resource for casual fans and prep sports junkies alike, has always had a bare-bones aesthetic – and no extra charge for its visitors.
The site will now have a new subscription-based revenue model with three pricing tiers: light ($15 per season), moderate ($40 per season) and heavy ($140 per season).
“We’re trying to stay afloat now that we’re no longer having our bills paid by a separate company,” site founder Ned Freeman said in an email to the Bay Area News Group, which has used the site to help with its coverage for years.
HSRatings’ financial difficulties date back to last football season, when the website temporarily shut down after accusing CBS of reneging on its contractual agreement to compensate the site for the extensive data it provided to MaxPreps. This included national schedules, scores, ratings and projections as well as league and divisional alignments.
Freedman told BANG that HSRatings no longer has a contract with CBS, which sold MaxPreps to media company PlayOn in April.
Grissom and the CCS considered pivoting to MaxPreps’ ratings or the Massey ratings used by some sections in Southern California when HSRatings temporarily shut down. He’s not sure what CCS will do now, but he’s interested in exploring the possibility of continuing to partner with HSRatings.
Freeman told BANG that no sections have reached out to him to discuss a group subscription, although Grissom said he was considering whether that might be an option for CCS.
HSRatings wasn’t just an essential resource for section seeding decisions. Bay Area football coaches spoke fondly of their experiences with the site, which helped with scheduling and postseason preparation as well as simply providing good, clean fun for those addicted to prep football.
“I’m on there probably every day,” said Los Gatos coach Mark Krail, a 28-year veteran of the CCS head coaching ranks. “I like to look at numbers and matchups, and the schedules are always really convenient there.”
How CCS decides to proceed will have an effect on its programs. Krail said that if the section does not opt into some sort of subscription, Los Gatos would consider signing up for its own.
Wilcox coach Paul Rosa noted that CCS doesn’t necessarily use HSRatings constantly, but the section would either need to sign up at some point or modify its playoff selection criteria before the seeding meeting arrives late this fall.
In its current football seeding formula, the CCS awards bonus points to teams in the top 150 of HSRatings’ California rankings. Schools also receive extra points for beating other teams in that range.
“It does come in handy when you’re scheduling or when you’re trying to follow teams, because some of the teams you play are outside the area,” said Rosa, who has coached Wilcox for 11 seasons. “And then the ranking part of it is big too, because someone on your schedule, their ranking can change, and then now their point value is different coming toward the season. It’s definitely a tool that everybody used a lot.”
Serra coach Patrick Walsh, who is entering his 25th year at the San Mateo private school, has enjoyed using HSRatings’ projection feature to compare what teams like his legendary 2023 group would theoretically have done against other historic teams.
“I use it for fun sometimes to do a matchup, just to see how a team like one of the teams we’re playing will match up against another team we’re playing,” Walsh said.
All three coaches praised HSRatings for its accuracy and reliability compared to other rating systems. And they all indicated a willingness to pay for it under the right circumstances.
“As a business, I’m sure it takes a lot of time for them to put all that together,” Walsh continued. “They have software that generates projections; they should get paid. It’s not some magical AI thing that’s sitting there, something that takes no time for humans. They’ve been doing this long before AI ever even existed.”