TAMPA, Florida – Sitting in the stands among friends and family, a man constantly takes notes during the game.

For longtime high school sportswriter Bob Putnam, schools may be closed during the summer, but he’s constantly on the move.

Nobody knows the high school scene like the man nicknamed Big Game Bobby. The St. Peter native and USF graduate covered high school sports in four counties for the Tampa Bay Times for 28 years.

“I think I tried a lot of sports there, whether it was high school, wrestling, tennis, golf, swimming, whatever,” Bob recalls while attending a girls’ summer league game.

Four years ago, when the pandemic hit, the newspaper also faced massive cuts and Big Game Bobby was sidelined.

So in April 2020, Bob bet on himself, leveraged his talent and thirty-year-old high school contacts and launched his own online sports site: Prime Time Preps.

Bob covers every sport in Hernando, Pasco, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties and puts his personal touch on them.

In March of this year, his website, Prime Time Preps, reached a new high of one million visits in a month alone – a milestone for this one-man act.

For Bob, the greatest reward for covering the high school scene is being able to meet a kid he covered who tells him he still has the article he wrote about him.

Bob does it for the parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and the Tampa Bay Area hopes he never stops.