Calgary Journal Online

The face of Calgary high school sports coverage is changing thanks to krammag.com, an emerging Calgary-based online magazine.

Kram Mag, as it is known by its readers, is a website devoted to covering high school sports and athletes in Calgary.

Kram Mag creator Jonas Emilsson speaks with a high school football player after covering a game earlier this month.

Photo: Nicholas Wright/Calgary Journal

Emilsson was a high school and collegiate athlete in Calgary before graduating from SAIT’s journalism program, after which he began working as a technical writer at WestJet. His interest in secondary school sports continued after graduation, but he recognized that the coverage of it in Calgary was lacking the in-depth attention it deserved.

“After graduating I still remained a big fan of high school sports. I always checked out the events, but I also found it really hard to keep up with what was happening in the high school sports scene,” Emilsson said.

From there Emilsson went about combining his three passions in life—sports, photography and creative writing—into what is now known as Kram Mag. The website has become increasingly popular with the high school sports community in the last few years, garnering a modest few hundred hits a month in 2007 to averaging almost six thousand a month last year.

Emilsson admits that the website’s success is somewhat of a surprise, saying: “I just created a website, and it started off more as a hobby, and it evolved into a lot more than I thought it would.”

Kram Mag also utilizes some of the more popular forms of social media and communication technology by hosting regular podcasts, as well as maintaining Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The sports community seems to agree that Kram Mag is providing a useful service for high school athletes and fans in Calgary.

Josh Pouk, a Grade 12 student and football player at Ernest Manning High School, believes that better coverage of high school sports is a good thing: “Things like podcasts and people talking about the game, and how we did on TV and on websites, with pictures of us. That would be interesting.”

An important function of Kram Mag’s coverage of high school athletes is bringing them to the attention of colleges and universities.

B.K. Samuel, an 18-year-old student and athlete at Ernest Manning High School, sees focused high school sports coverage as being pivotal in an athletes chances of getting recognized by a post-secondary institution: “If somebody is put in a story then a university doesn’t have to look that far because the kid is right there.”

The website’s ability to recognize athletes and showcase their abilities on a bigger stage, which helps them attract interest from post-secondary schools, is a part of the Emilsson’s motivation for producing Kram Mag.

“Another benefit of the website that I can bring to the audience is by profiling some of the top athletes. It gives them a nice little tool for recruiting.”

Emilsson admits that in order to attract the most readers the website has focused on the most popular sports in high school in the past, but this practice is something he hopes to change in the future.

“My goal is to expand the coverage,” he says, referring to his desire to cover a wider range of sports more extensively, such as rugby and volleyball.

You can visit the website at www.krammag.com