9/9/2025

Wrapping up week 1 of the 2025-26 High school sports season last Saturday on the Eli Sports network was the “Fish Bowl” a football game between crosstown rivals Gig Harbor and Peninsula.

Before we get into the opening week of 8 football games, let’s explain further how this all works. The NFHS (National Federation of High Schools) Network is a longtime non-profit oirganization and several years ago they partnered with a private company called Play On Sports. The two entities merged together and Play-On developed the platform that many fans watch high school games and events. 

The NFHS/Play On sports company own the broadcasting/streaming rights to most if not all state associations by purchasing those rights with a combination flat fee and profit sharing agreement. 

So, where does Eli Sports fit into this? The best way to explain this would be like if the NFHS was NBC television and Eli Sports was King 5 TV in Seattle, the NBC Washington state affiliate. The difference is NBC supplies content to King 5 in daytime and primetime programming whereas under the NFHS system it’s the affiliates like Eli Sports that create the content and put up on the National platform.

Just like the national television format there are several affiliates in each state like KHQ in Spokane and KNDO in Yakima. Eli Sports is just one of many affiliates in Washington state including schools can choose to be their own affiliate.

Eli Sports’ headquarters is in Centralia and we work with many schools who want us to come and broadcast their games and events from Seattle to Vancouver. We focus on a positive broadcast, looking to give as many players and programs attention as possible. We also write up a story and try to get some interviews and include game highlightsw in our coverage.

We know this type of coverage is getting harder and harder to find in many areas although some are still getting really excellent coverage from traditional media.

Now that you know how this all works, we’ll be releasing our viewer stats weekly on what games we are doing and how they are being received by our viewers.

Measuring system

Our rankings are based on actual device views, we also take an educated guess as to how many people per device are watching or listening. That number is slightly more than 2 people per device at 2.25. If you don’t want to believe the guess there is no denying the actual number of unique device counts. Traditional media has guessed for decades at their readership, listeners and viewers. Newspapers used to times 4 for each printed edition of their paper regardless of how many were delivered or sold based on the belief of an average household was 4 people and each one of them looked at the paper at some point. 

Radio and television for years had a small group of people who used to literally keep diaries of their listening and viewing habits and with a mathematical formula exttapolated the ratings numbers.

In the end we will also divide each audience into the overall viewers for a final percent for the week, which we will call our “share” of viewers.

Week 1

Week 1 of our broadcast schedule for the 2025-26 school sports seasons was last Thursday through Saturday and we did 8 football games. Week 2 we will be adding girls soccer and volleyball to our schedule.

www.elisportsnetwork.com