Taking a moment to say I sure hope you all enjoyed a great Independence Day, and are having fun on our most true summertime holiday weekend.
It’s been a little crazy around here. Has been, for a while.
It happens every year, though this time around it seems magnified some (quite a bit, actually) as I dared to take some days off back in April and May to sub in men’s golf league back in Central City, where we lived for 31 years, running the local newspaper.
That in itself was a bit of a melancholy experience, seeing so many friends I’d figured I always see, but haven’t for nearly five years, yet at the same time enjoying the golf with my very good friend Mike Malm and his partner, the great Jeff Miller. You ain’t played men’s golf league until you’ve played with Miller, trust me.
What has unfolded over the last couple of weeks in my world has bordered on the insane. For instance…
* There was way-worse-than-usual return on our preseason forms, which put me on hold for a while back in the early part of May. We did get the vast majority of them (right at 90%, still about 4% less than last year) after a lot of e-mails, a lot of texts and a lot of finger crossing for good luck.
* There some of the outside work I do for the company which publishes our magazine, eight assignments (four counties which surround Atlanta; Arlington, Austin, Fort Worth and Houston in Texas; and the state of Tennessee. I do love these assignments, which includes me writing features stories for websites which preview the upcoming high school football season. And you’re right, it is a lot like what I do with Huskerland.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy them so much. The four Atlanta assignments were due on July 4 (made it), with the others all due by the end of the month. I have a lot of the stuff researched, though I haven’t written much for the last five, with the biggest hurdle being the scheduling of phone interviews with players. (As you will see, this year that is also a Huskerland sort of thing.)
* Our dishwasher gave out, our landscape guy never showed up, our lawn crew did but they left open one (or both) of our backyard gates, leading to the wild chase of our two Golden Retrievers, Cooper and Charlie. (Funny, as I was preparing to write all this, I had a flashback to a very early video of those two clowns when the were just a couple of minutes old, then posted it on what was then called Twitter. If you have been with us for a while you might remember that. They’re still cute, just gray, and there’s no shame in that, said one 67-year-old man.)
* We are also in the middle of a banner week for ol’ Huskerland Bob:
July 1. On3/Rivals merger and all the fun that has come along with it.
July 2. I celebrated (with sweet, sweet memories) the 46th anniversary of my first day at the Custer County Chief. No first day there, and we’re not talking to each other today. I’d probably still be running a welder, which I was my job prior to that magic moment.
July 3. The 60th anniversary of my first epileptic seizure, a Grand Mal (go big, or go home), suffered after an evening at the home of my Aunt Ellen and uncle Hilbert, where my sister, Becky, and I bottled up a good number of fire flies. So cool! Glowing in the dark and all! At 11:17 – I remember seeing the sunflower shaped clock in our living room as they wheeled me out to the ambulance – things had changed rather dramatically.
July 4. Happy birthday, USA! And I always thought of all the giant blockbuster movies, Independence Day was one of the best.
July 5. As they say in baseball, an “off day.” But the day is young, so who knows what’s up the rest of the day.
July 6. If we make it, tomorrow is our 40th wedding anniversary, me and Huskerland Penni. Black and white wedding in an unairconditioned church at 6 p.m…shoulda thought that part through a little bit. It’s been quite a ride, our marriage, so many twists and turns, and good fortune gone my way at crucial moments in my life. If somebody wasn’t looking out for me (thanks, former Arnold Sentinel boss Bill Crosland, you changed my life), there’s have been no sports writing career, no newspaper publishing, no Huskerland, and no Huskerland Penni.
All I can say is, there is a God.
* And then there was The Switch. Back in April it was announced the national college and high school website, On3, had purchased Rivals from our mother ship, Yahoo! The merger of the sites was, you guessed it (or maybe really knew it), July 1. I will address this further in a bit.
Which brings us to Huskerland Prep Report’s annual preseason magazine. I have a self-appointed deadline of the second Friday in July, but give myself the weekend as a fallback, as needed. And there year there is need.
Without all the forms I can’t compile the monstrously long Top 225 feature, and this year’s is as complete as you can be with 10 percent of the forms missing. (Some schools who never miss.) I have always done a decent job of time management with this magazine, realizing that I write the entire thing myself, and have for 15 years. (Prior to that I had a sports writer on staff who I had write a couple of classes, so he felt some ownership in what we were doing. The rest of it was me.)
I finished the Top 225 just yesterday. It is a fun project, one which takes the better part of a month to complete, given the research (no, for real, I actually do look at some stuff to make these rankings), writing, photo work and such that goes into completing the pages. Still need to get them on the page, and do the photo work, but we are a lot closer than we were a week ago.
* Which brings us back to the On3/Rivals merger, and how it impacts this website.
There is a learning curve to operating the new website, and I am getting there, still working around some bumps in the road. At the national level, colleges come first, high schools next, so all of my archived stories and the message board archives have yet to be transferred to the new website, though they will ASAP, I am assured. As a result, we have the archives here, the new stuff on the new website, soooo, we are sort of stuck in the middle with you. (Gee thanks, Stealer’s Wheel!)
The new website for Huskerland Preps, on the On3 network is: https://www.on3.com/sites/huskerland-preps. All current subscribers will have their subscriptions switched to the new site. Like my friends at RIvals – and I was one of the first two high school publishers hired for the site – the folks at On3 are pros, and you will enjoy their work across the network, promise.
I hope you come on over to the new site, and tell your friends, because the juicy stuff is always published in the last weeks of the summer, leading up to the start of the season.
Now, back to your weekend…Huskerland Bob.