There was a time, not so long ago, when the sideline at a high school football game in Texas contained a manageable population: a few newspaper photographers, a local television crew, perhaps a stringer or two from the wire services. The athletes were the show; the documenters were the footnotes.
That time has passed.
At marquee matchups like Duncanville versus DeSoto — two Dallas-area programs separated by less than ten miles and united by their production of Division I prospects — the sideline has become its own traffic problem. Where once there might have been 10 or 15 credentialed media members, according to Mike Roach, a national recruiting analyst for 247Sports who has covered high school football in the South for a decade, there can now be 70 or 80 photographers and videographers jostling for position along the hash marks.
The newcomers are not, for the most part, from newspapers. Many are what administrators and state athletic associations have taken to calling "private content creators" — individuals hired by players or their families, often through informal arrangements, to produce personalized photos and videos for recruiting reels and social media accounts. In Arizona, officials at the state interscholastic association have coined a term for the phenomenon: the "pajama paparazzi," a reference to the casual attire and occasionally unprofessional conduct of creators who are sometimes barely older than the athletes they're filming.
(As one athletic director in Ohio put it, with the weariness of someone who has seen the credentialing inbox: "Everyone has a media company now.")
The trend has accelerated since 2021, when pandemic restrictions lifted and name-image-likeness rules began filtering down from the college ranks. The barriers to entry have lowered accordingly; equipment that once required significant investment is now affordable, and the platforms that matter most to recruiters — Instagram, Twitter, TikTok — require no printing press. The result, as Arianna Grainey, a professional photojournalist in Arizona, describes it, is a sideline populated by newcomers who arrive with ring lights and full-size tripods, occasionally sit cross-legged in the path of play, and possess "little to no sense of general sideline etiquette."
Some administrators have begun to push back. Arizona became only the second state, after North Carolina, to require background checks for sideline credentials; the policy reduced issued credentials by roughly a third. Northgate High School in Georgia recently announced it would charge up to $25 for credentials to applicants not affiliated with established outlets — not a prohibitive sum, but a gate nonetheless. Other districts are considering assigned sideline positions, a practice borrowed from professional sports, where the question of who belongs where was settled long ago.
Chris Fisher, a teacher and offensive line coach at Ridge Point High School in Missouri City, Texas, noted the underlying concern. "When someone is on the field with school-aged children, there is an assumption that they have been vetted," Mr. Fisher said. "But when families start wanting to hire private people — people who aren't representing the home or away team or an established outlet — it just increases the potential for bad actors."
The solutions remain patchwork, varied by state and district and sometimes by the volunteer working the gate on any given Friday night. The demand, meanwhile, shows no sign of abating. As Ms. Grainey observed, surveying the crowded sideline at a regular-season game: "It's beginning to look like a Super Bowl."
Which is to say, the sightlines have never been worse.
Original story published in Front Office Sports: "'Pajama Paparazzi' at HS FB Games"