When High School Football Meets The Campaign Trail, The Results Are A Lot More Awesome Than You'd Expect

We're well into high school football season, which means you've probably been exposed to your local newspaper's special edition highlighting the region's top teams and star players.

These are almost always identical and uninspired, with generic quotations and boring photos of gruff coaches and unsmiling players trying to look their toughest. That wasn't the case for the Tri-City Herald of southern Washington, which took a creative turn on the campaign trail to illustrate the region's teams. You can see the full gallery and an extensive write-up of how it was done by photographer Kai-Huei Yau, and trust me that it's worth a look because they really are fantastic and unique photos. That Yau cajoled high school kids to pose for them alone is impressive enough.

The series was inspired by the (then) St. Petersburg Times' Melissa Lyttle's award-winning 2007 spread of high school players in Florida using a Sunshine State theme. Usually, these features are of interest to pretty much nobody outside the friends and family of those highlighted in the stories; we applaud anybody who comes up with a way to make them interesting to a broader audience.

[ On the campaign trail]