The Star Tribune’s All-Metro honors for high school sports excellence date back to the mid-1980s. We have named All-Metro Players of the Year in several sports and named All-Metro first and second teams for 40 years. Future Miami Hurricane and Dallas Cowboy Steve Walsh of Cretin-Derham Hall was our first football All-Metro Player of the Year in 1984. Early basketball winners were future Gophers stars Kevin Lynch (Bloomington Jefferson, 1987) and Shannon Loeblien (St. Paul Harding, 1990 and 1991). The All-Metro name served us well, and now it’s time for a new era.

With the Star Tribune’s deeper investment this year in coverage of communities across greater Minnesota, and the high school coverage team’s new similar commitment to covering student-athletes and teams across our state, the move fits. Readers will see, starting today with our girls and boys All-Minnesota soccer teams, that Star Tribune journalists will select 25 athletes in each team sport from across the state to form these teams. We’ll continue to name a Player of the Year, and this young man or woman could live in Ely, Edina, Edgerton, Eagan or anywhere in between.

We hope you like this All-Minnesota change, and perhaps even more so other changes in motion or coming soon. Those include:

If you have any questions about our new approach, please send me an email at chris.carr@startribune.com. And you can reach our preps coverage team anytime by emailing preps@startribune.com.

Congratulations today to the first wave of All-Minnesota Team student-athletes. You earned that name. It’s new, but it fits.