Staff report
Attention local news and sports fans, you are in for a treat! This month, Shore Local Newsmagazine and Glory Days Magazine began combining forces to bring fans of both publications a brand new sports section inside Shore Local.
(You can check out the first installment of the Glory Days sports section today by picking up a copy of the latest Shore Local magazine.)
The section will begin as a once-per-month special section — with the goal of becoming twice per month — inside Shore Local and bring you updates on high school sports in the Cape-Atlantic League as well as some information and features involving youth sports and people in the South Jersey sports community.
“As we have seen in recent years, regional and national publications have cut staff and consolidated assets in an effort to remain viable, but at the local level, both Shore Local and Glory Days have been able to tap into the passion in our communities for local news and sports coverage,” said Glory Days Publisher Dave “Sully” O’Sullivan. “Here at Glory Days, we have seen our fan base continue to increase each year since we began in 2013 and we’re excited about teaming up with Shore Local to add a new element to the area’s media scene.”
Glory Days is one of the leading high school sports outlets in South Jersey and has grown exponentially since its inception seven years ago. Sully is a former high school and college baseball player who also spent 15 years in the newspaper business, working for such companies as The Asbury Park Press, The Daily Journal of Vineland and The Press of Atlantic City as a writer, photographer, editor and page designer. He has been involved with high school sports throughout his career, and his mission when he launched Glory Days was to dive deeper beyond the scores and statistics to tell the stories of the people who are so passionate about high school sports.
“There is so much passion and interest in high school sports everywhere in this country, and particularly in South Jersey, because the student-athletes and families that support them are such a big part of local communities,” Sully said. “There are so many great stories out there, from kids who are excelling in the classroom and leadership roles to coaches who have dedicated their lives to teaching and mentoring young men and women. It’s our great pleasure to be the platform — and now expand that platform to Shore Local — that gets to tell these stories and bring fans closer to the action and the people who make all these sports so exciting to follow.”
During its first six years in business, Glory Days provided a twice-monthly print edition, but at the start of 2019 it switched to an all-digital platform at glorydaysonline.com in order to begin the process of expanding to cover more of the Cape-Atlantic League, which features schools in Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland counties. This past fall, Glory Days also brought on popular South Jersey football writer Mark Trible in an effort to reach other parts of South Jersey, such as Salem, Gloucester and Camden counties, and launched a weekly Facebook Live football broadcast. These days, glorydaysonline.com garners an average of 20,000 page views per month, and more than 10,000 fans follow the magazine on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
“Going all digital in 2019 was the first step in Glory Days really beginning to expand throughout South Jersey and becoming a big-time player in high school sports in South Jersey,” Sully said. “And even though we have been in business for seven years, we feel as though we are still just scratching the surface in terms of what we can do and how we can engage fans. Partnering with Shore Local provides us with another great opportunity to introduce new fans to what we are doing, and allows us to show more people all the good that high school athletes are doing, not only in their respective sports, but also with community service and leadership.”
Shore Local, as its loyal readers already know, is quickly becoming a force in the South Jersey media scene, so much so that it now produces weekly print editions throughout the summer. The magazine has more than 300 distribution points and the Fertsch family has done an outstanding job in filling the void that has been created by larger area media businesses downsizing. And now, having two of the area’s best family owned media organizations join forces provides readers and fans of both publications even more content that you have grown to love!