Dave Ross is simply known as "The Voice."

After it appeared otherwise, the veteran Roanoke sportscaster will be heard, and seen, again this fall on high school football telecasts.

Ross has done play-by-play on weekly prep games on Friday nights in the Roanoke Valley since 1986 for a variety of local television stations on a tape-delayed basis.

In recent years he has worked with students from Franklin County High School in Rocky Mount to bring those games to local viewers on Saturday afternoons.

Ross, whose fulltime broadcasting career began in 1971 in Utica, New York, works side-by-side with the High School students who operate the cameras and direct to production from the game site.

The students are paid for their work, which is part of their hands-on High School curriculum.

For the past several years the games aired on Roanoke cable channel WWCW.

This year, the local Game of the Week has a new platform.

Ross and company have partnered with Carl York, a local businessman and publisher of "Crunch," a weekly broadsheet that is distributed to 38 High Schools in the Roanoke Valley, New River Valley and Lynchburg areas along with other selected locations.

Now called the "Crunch Game of the Week with Dave Ross," the replay will be posted at 3 p.m. Saturday on the crunchhssports.com website, where it will remain archived.

Ross and York brainstormed and decided to join forces.

"[York] mentioned that maybe we could do something together," Ross said. "We put our heads together and said, 'OK, this could be good.'

"Plus, I wanted to see if I could [personally] keep it going, but I guess at some point I've got to hang it up."

York said he was eager for several reasons.

"We didn't want these [Franklin County] kids not to be able to do something they've done for the past few years," York said. "They really work their butts off.

"I'm usually working on Saturdays so I haven't really been able to watch a lot [of previous games]. So they've been sending me [video] so I can test it and load it up and make sure everything is OK. Those kids do a great job. They've got a couple cameras. They've got color. It's well done."

York said his motivation is not entirely altruistic.

"We wanted another draw to our website," he said. "We're still working out the bugs on what we want it to look like. We're eventually going to get to where part of it's free and if you want more than that, then it's a subscription.

"It's really just a draw, plus it gets us into another vertical that we haven't had, and that's TV."

And in 2022, broadcasts are available just about anywhere.

"It's made to order," York said. We'll put it up [on the site] at 3 o'clock and it will stay up there forever. And with technology, you can cast it on your TV and watch it, or kids can watch it on their phone.

"You can watch it on the smallest and the biggest.

"And if you're crunched for time and you say, 'I want to see that interception that happened in the third quarter,' you can just go there."

York has plans beyond the High School football season, if the students and faculty sponsor at Franklin County are willing partners.

"We're going to try to use this for basketball and maybe some wrestling," he said. "We'd like to see if that's something they would want to do. It would have to be up to them."

Ross and color commentator Steve Myers plan to do one game per week through the regular season, similar to the previous schedule.

New this year is a "Crunch" poll in which the web site lists two possible games and has readers vote for one.

Friday's non-district game sending E.C. Glass to Lord Botetourt won out over the River Ridge District matchup between Cave Spring and Hidden Valley in Roanoke County. Glass defeated Botetourt 28-14 in each team’s season opener on August 26.

York said he and Ross will try to spread the wealth, but because high school students are involved in the production and most games end around 9:30 p.m., the objective is to limit travel as much as possible.

"We don't want to cover the same team all year long so we can kind of control who's in the mix." York said. "We obviously can't drive to Richmond or Harrisonburg, so what we'll try to do is get some of the teams from Lynchburg or the New River Valley when they come to Roanoke."