Happy New Year everyone and welcome to our seventh Western Arkansas issue of High School Sports-The Magazine.

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to our seventh Western Arkansas issue of High School Sports-The Magazine. Our No. 1 resolution is to keep "bringin' it" every month with the best stories and photos of your favorite high school stars as well as intriguing features on players you may have never heard of before. This month we name the All-HSSTM Teams for football. Now, selecting such squads is never an easy task. It's impossible to make everyone happy because there are always a few deserving players who are left out. However, we talked with as many coaches and fans as possible to ensure our postseason awards are as accurate as possible. Because it is our first time selecting an all-area team for football, we bounced around several different formats for presenting the teams. Do we have just one team from all the conferences — big and small — combined? Or, do we split it up among the big conferences and small conferences just as we have done with our weekly coaches' polls throughout the year? We decided to do both by selecting our Super Squad from all 28 schools in our coverage area combined while also naming our Big Squad and our Small Squad members. We tinkered with the idea of having more than one team or an honorable mention squad to include more players, but decided naming more than 100 players would only water down the importance of making one of the squads. We also selected such honors as Team of the Year, Player of the Year and Newcomers of the Year, among others. While those awards were a given in most cases, it was the Coach of the Year that we debated the most. So many coaches from our area were deserving like Greenwood's Rick Jones, Siloam Springs' Clint Ashcraft, Fort Smith Northside's Darrell Henry, Gravette's Bill Harrelson, Shiloh Christian's Josh Floyd, Mountainburg's Tom Harrell, Farmington's Mike Adams and Greenland's Tracy Sutton. In the end, we decided to make it Co-Coach of the Year with Fayetteville's Daryl Patton and Springdale Har-Ber's Chris Wood sharing the honor. Our second main feature this month is called "Starting From Scratch," which walks us through the process of starting a new school and athletic program. There's also features on Prairie Grove's girls basketball, West Fork's Frankie Sprick and Rogers' super sophomore Morgan Hook. Also, don't miss our Grill with Van Buren coach Merrill Mankin, GamePlan Youth with West Fork dynamo Kiehl Frazier, Family Affair with Southside coach Sherry White, a feature on female athletic directors, Where are they now? with former Gentry star Allyson Twiggs and much, much more.-