Crozier Media is a digital-first sports media platform specializing in high school athletics across Southeastern Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania at large. With a focus on compelling storytelling, detailed coverage, and high-quality visuals, Crozier Media provides a trusted voice for local sports and a platform for athletes to be seen.

Built, Not Born: How Southern Lehigh Became a Football Town

9/26/26

CENTER VALLEY — Southern Lehigh wasn’t always this.

There have been good football teams here before. There have been championships and memorable seasons. But for most of Southern Lehigh’s history, nobody was confusing Center Valley with one of Pennsylvania’s traditional high school football strongholds.

Something has changed.

You can find it in the record books. The Spartans went 10-2 in 2023. A year later, they won the District 11 Class 4A championship and advanced farther than any Southern Lehigh team before them, reaching the PIAA semifinals. Then came 2025. Fifteen wins. Another district championship. A trip to the state final for the first time. And finally, a 43-21 victory over Twin Valley that delivered the first PIAA football championship in school history.

It took years to build.

And on a Friday night in late September, you didn’t need a history book to see what all that winning has created.

You could see it pulling into the parking lot.

You could see it in a packed stadium barely three years old, its new turf glowing underneath the lights. You could hear it when the scoreboard’s noise meter challenged the crowd to get louder.

And you could see it stretching almost the length of the home sideline.

Roughly 70 kids. In uniform. Waiting to play football for Southern Lehigh.

That’s when it hits you.

This is a football town now.

And then the Spartans went out and played like one.

Southern Lehigh wasted little time showing it.

The Spartans took the opening possession and marched down the field for a touchdown, setting a tone that Lehighton never really disrupted. By Southern Lehigh’s second possession, quarterback Colton Sams was beginning to look exactly like the quarterback of a defending state champion — calm, controlled and rarely appearing rushed.

Watching Sams in person, it was his footwork that stood out.

On rollouts and bootlegs, he consistently got his feet underneath him, squared his shoulders to his receivers and delivered the football rather than relying solely on his arm while moving. Nothing looked frantic. He simply executed.

By halftime, Southern Lehigh had built a 21-0 lead and Sams had thrown two touchdown passes.

Otto Young was one of his primary targets. The junior finished with approximately 63 receiving yards and a touchdown, including a 21-yard reception during Southern Lehigh’s early surge. His touchdown came on a go route late in the second quarter, another example of Sams putting the football where it needed to be and allowing his playmaker to finish the job.

And Southern Lehigh wasn’t relying solely on its quarterback.

Jack MoDavis provided the balance on the ground, rushing for approximately 87 yards and two touchdowns. Adam Fritts offered perhaps an even better illustration of the athletic depth on this roster. Fritts carried only three times but turned those opportunities into roughly 60 yards — an average of 20 yards per carry — while also making his presence felt as a two-way player. I hope the Spartans plan to use him more offensively. The kid is a stud.

The third quarter removed whatever suspense remained.

Sams rolled out and delivered his third touchdown pass of the night to push the advantage to 28-0 with 7:11 remaining. Another Southern Lehigh rushing touchdown made it 35-0.

Then came perhaps the most telling moment of the entire night.

With roughly four minutes still remaining in the third quarter, Southern Lehigh began pulling its offensive starters.

Sams’ night was finished with approximately 140 passing yards and three touchdowns. The Spartans’ second unit would handle the fourth quarter on both sides of the football.

That may have been the most revealing statistic of the night.

Not 35 points.

Not the shutout.

Not even the individual numbers.

Time.

Southern Lehigh had put the game away so thoroughly that many of its starters were spectators before the third quarter was finished.

And for Sams, those three touchdown passes carried meaning beyond Friday night.

The senior entered this season already established as one of the most productive quarterbacks in Southern Lehigh history, and every touchdown now moves him closer to the top of District 11’s career passing record book. His three against Lehighton were another step in that pursuit — an individual run at history taking place inside a much larger story about a program that has been making some history of its own.

There’s a certain symmetry to that.

A year ago, Sams and Young were connecting for touchdowns on the biggest stage in Pennsylvania. Young caught two touchdown passes from Sams in Southern Lehigh’s 43-21 state-championship victory over Twin Valley.

Now the Spartans are playing a classification higher, moving from Class 4A to 5A following their championship season. Yet on Friday night, very little looked like a program trying to figure out life after reaching the mountaintop.

It looked established.

The shiny stadium and packed stands tell you people are interested. The noise meter tells you they’re engaged. Roughly 70 players dressed on the sideline tells you kids want to be part of it. A state championship tells you what the program has already accomplished.

But watching Southern Lehigh dismantle Lehighton 35-0 told you something else.

The Spartans aren’t trying to become a football program anymore.

They’ve built one.

Local Sports Coverage Has a Data Problem

April 2, 2026

Remember the Sunday morning sports section of the local newspaper?

I do—and I loved reading it.

The front-page images and accompanying stories were awesome. I remember the numerous pro box scores and the up-to-date high school passing, scoring, and strikeout leaders.

Gone are the days of the local newspaper—a central place where sports writers could inform the public on a daily, if not weekly, basis about which high school teams were performing and which ones weren’t. League standings were consistently produced, and top individual performances were logged. Each week, you knew which athletes and teams meant business.

Fast forward 29 years—what do we have?

We have countless social media accounts and their affiliated websites. We have yesterday’s scaled-down newspaper Facebook page and school district athletic department Instagram pages. We have a plethora of high school team and individual student-athlete X accounts—and fortunately for me, Crozier Media—just one of many small, independent social media sports platforms.

Today, we get immediate Instagram game-day scores, student-produced images and videos, and highlight reels from national social media accounts. We get it all—and we get it fast.

But I have a question.

Has all of this content—from its speed to the many different angles—improved the way we consume and report on local sports?

I don’t think it has.

While there are definitely pros to the way local sports are currently covered, the lack of a consistent and timely dataset presented to the public—a true measuring stick—makes it incredibly challenging to know who’s who and who’s not in local sports.

Not all is lost. The Philadelphia Catholic League’s boys’ basketball stat collection initiative is a good first step. I used this information, available on their website, on a weekly basis during my coverage of the 2025–2026 season.

While I like to think I do a decent job providing a platform for student-athletes and covering aspects of local sports, I’m too small—as are many others—to cover every local contest.

Therefore, I think it’s important that, locally, a system is established for the collection, reporting, and distribution of individual sport performances during each contest. It would benefit all of us—especially student-athletes—for teams to report individual statistics to the PIAA or a designated organization for public distribution.

And if we want to truly elevate local sports coverage—it starts here.

Firebirds Add Rugby to the Nest This Fall

April 2, 2026

Rugby is coming to Bristol Pike.

Holy Ghost Prep, a private, all-boys Roman Catholic college preparatory school, is adding the sport this fall. Rugby sevens, as it’s called, is a variant of rugby union in which teams are made up of seven players who compete in seven-minute halves, instead of the traditional 15 players playing 40-minute halves.

The Firebirds will join 19 other school related rugby programs in the state (13 boys, 6 girls). Competition takes place in a tournament format, typically consisting of four matches. High school teams can expect to compete in five to six tournaments during the regular season.

Conestoga High School was the first high school program in Pennsylvania. It is also the oldest continuously operating high school rugby program in the United States, established in 1971 by teacher and coach Clarence Culpepper.

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