As another scholastic athletic year starts, I wanted to introduce you to some new ways to stay abreast of all the high school sports action.

We couldn't do this without continuing to do what we've done over the past two years.

Game stories are - and will continue to be - published online on game nights, so you don't have to wait until Sunday or Wednesday to read about it.

Our blog - SWakeSports - is updated daily with features about local players committing to colleges, rankings or breakdowns of stats.

And now we're going to break out even more features to bring you the top coverage of all local high schoolsports.

Score updates on Twitter: Get up-to-date scores as well as links to stories you may have missed during the week at twitter.com/SWakeSports.

And on Fridays for football, you can visit the News & Observer's PrepsNow Twitter page for score updates from all area games.

Weekly blog features: Last year, my Thursday morning football predictions were both popular and on-point.

I had a 79 percent accuracy of picking football games, and that included going 11-for-11 in the playoffs.

These are posted every Thursday morning with analysis and a projected margin of victory.

On Mondays, I'll post another blog examining how well - or poorly - I did.

On Fridays, I'll post another blog for where you can listen to the games online - a growing service in our area.

Sometimes I help out on these broadcasts, particularly with David Maney of Cary's iHigh.com site.

Outer Loop Sports Show: Perhaps some of you watched the YouTube videos last year of the Outer Loop Sports Show.

The 10-minute webcast featuring GarnerTrojans.com creator Chris Edwards, Smithfield Herald sports editor D. Clay Best and myself.

We focused the show around the weekly goings-on in the Tri-Nine and Greater Neuse conferences - two conferences located just outside the beltline.

This year, it's back and better - even bigger - than ever.

Unless otherwise noted, the show will be recorded every Wednesday and streamed live on UStream.com (we will also have links to this on the blog) before being archived on there.

We give out player-of-the-week awards and discuss the week that was.

This year the show has expanded to three 10-minute segments and will be broadcasted on local-access channels on Time Warner Cable.

Some of these segments will be lighter in nature and feature more of the student-athletes we cover.

We're also opening up the Outer Loop discussion for our area schools that don't belong to those two 4-A conferences.

Check out our first live broadcast today at 10 a.m.

The next two will be this Saturday at the VYPE High School Conference and Expo, starting at 11 a.m.

Two new schools: In addition to the eight public schools we cover, all in the Tri-Nine Conference, we also cover Cary Academy and Cary Christian.

This year, we will include Grace Christian of Raleigh - which is on Buck Jones Road - and, to a lesser extent, Cardinal Gibbons.

The Grace Christian addition gives us a school that's practically in Cary.

Cardinal Gibbons is in Raleigh.

But I do understand plenty of western Wake County students add to its athletic success.

When possible, we'll try to provide you with some Gibbons coverage.

Live blog: Every week, The News and Observer, in addition to having the most complete list of stats for boys soccer and football, will have a live blog of Friday football scores at newsobserver.com/high_school.