Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine comes in the mail

BOERNE SPORTS

Just the other day I received a copy of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine previewing the upcoming 2025 season.

Every year I get a complimentary media copy through the mail, and I look forward to it because it’s a reminder that the upcoming football season isn’t that far away. UT coach Steve Sarkisian is on this year’s cover.

This is the 65th year that the magazine, also known as the “Bible” of Texas High School football, has been published. Campbell passed away in December 2021 (of course on a Friday night) and would have turned 100 this year.

I remember when Campbell came to Boerne back in June 2005. The Greyhounds were scheduled to play in the Texas Football Classic that August after they had just come off their historic season in 2004.

That ’04 team had made the deepest playoff run in Greyhounds history up to that point, and BHS was picked to play in the game at the Alamodome to kick off the new season.

They held a pep-rally at a local car dealership on a hot summer afternoon to promote his magazine and the game, and I was able to spend a few minutes with Campbell. He took pictures with the team captains and there’s a photo of me with him somewhere out there.

When I interviewed Campbell, I asked about how and why he started the magazine. He basically told me that he was fulfilling a need because high school fans in the state of Texas were football hungry, and there really wasn’t anything for them at that time.

Sure, they could read about their home-town teams in their local papers, he explained, but what about teams in other parts of the state? Without the internet back then, he said it would have been much harder to find info in 1960.

That’s where Texas Football stood out and found its niche. Campbell centralized everything into one magazine, and there was information about your team no matter what part of the state you lived in.

That was the genesis of it all, and now it’s grown into an empire, and it’s really helped to change how high school football is covered in the state of Texas.

Even when he retired as a newspaper sports editor in 1993 after 40 years on the job, he stayed on with the magazine as its editor until 2021, the year he died. The magazine has been sold a few times, but it still churns out a quality product.

When I interviewed him, Campbell seemed like he really loved what he was doing. He was a nice man, quiet and softspoken but his voice still speaks loudly through his magazine and probably will for a long time.