Rich's Mostly Disjointed Ramblings: Organizing my football watching when it is still 100 degrees outside

I wish I was this organized when I was still a sports writer/editor. With these early August temperatures reaching 100 degrees or better, naturally my likely dehydrated self started to think about high school and college football and how I needed to get my schedules synced.

As I am semi/mostly-retired from the newspaper/media business, apparently I have time to organize. Surprisingly, it just took a few minutes to do so, which means my excuse for being too busy in the past to organize was just a bad excuse.

I printed schedules for my four teams – Hot Springs Bison, South Dakota Mines Hardrockers, Black Hills State University Yellow Jackets and the University of Wyoming Cowboys.

The key here was to figure out in advance which team/game I want to see each weekend.

The easy one is Hot Springs – the defending Class 11B state champs.  I’m going to each home game at Woodward Field, as well as to the Bison’s two Rapid City games at Christian and St. Thomas More.

Editor's note, I am a former Bison from back in the days of the water hose being the main sports hydrating drink. OK, it wasn’t quite that primitive, but almost. I am that old.

The harder part of this newfound organization is figuring out my college schedule. I need to find one open Saturday from the South Dakota Mines and Black Hills State schedules to head over to Laramie to see Wyoming. I covered the Cowboys for about 20 years. It should be sooner than later because traveling stress-free in good weather conditions to Wyoming in November is not a given.

Nothing is yet chiseled in stone, so I need to choose from a couple of games – Sept. 7 against Idaho and Sept. 28 against Air Force. Sept. 7 is a 1:30 p.m. game, while the Air Force game has a 6 p.m. kickoff. I like the later start because I am driving from Rapid City.

I thought about going to see Wyoming host BYU on Sept. 14, which will likely be a sold out show as the Cowboys and Cougars and their fans have never been friends, to say the least.

Then I remembered Sept. 13-14 is the Hot Springs High School Athletics Hall of Fame weekend, which is the homecoming game Sept. 13 and the HOF banquet the following night. I am not only a HOF committee member, but also a member of the Hall of Fame as a sophomore blocking dummy for the undefeated 1974 Class B state champion football team that was inducted in 2016.

I joke that I became a committee member to vote myself into the Hall of Fame. Am I really joking? That's for you to decide.

It also looks as if Sept. 7 isn’t looking good for the Wyoming trip since BHSU opens at home that day against Southwest Baptist. Mines will play that previous Thursday at Michigan Tech.  As a BH graduate, I need to get back to some Yellow Jacket games this year after not attending any games in Spearfish since I retired other than the annual Black Hills Brawl.

Other than watching BHSU and Mines when they brawl, the two schools often match home and away dates. This season I have three opportunities to watch the Jackets at home when the Hardrockers are either on the road or playing on a different day that week and two chances to watch Mines at home when BH is away.

With that said, there is the Southwest Baptist game, the Oct. 12 game against Western Colorado and Oct. 26 game against Chadron State. For the Hardrockers, there will be Thursday, Aug. 29 against CSU Pueblo and Sept. 14 against Upper Iowa.

The two teams meet for the 139th annual Black Hills Brawl Oct. 5 in Rapid City and both have home games on Sept. 21 (Mines hosts New Mexico Highlands and BH hosts Fort Lewis) and Nov. 9 (Mines hosts Colorado Mines and BH hosts Adams State). If I choose to go to one facility each in those two situations, weather could dictate me choosing Black Hills State Sept. 21 and Mines Nov. 9. I live just down the road from O’Harra Stadium, so I can make that game in bad weather.

My goal is to be on the sidelines for all or most of these home games to take pictures. I don’t really take photos for any media outlet these days, but I post on my personal blogs, Flickr and social media. It's a chance to still be close to the game, players, coaches and media friends, something I did for nearly 40 years in the newspaper business. It is hard to let go.

I did cover the Bison in the state title game in Vermillion last fall for the Fall River County Herald-Star and wrote three stories. In my first two years of retirement I worked as a freelancer and also part-time for the Mines athletic communications department last year. It appears, at least for now, that that won’t be the case this year.

Maybe I'll enter the transfer portal.

For now, it's all about getting ready for the upcoming seasons because I am slightly more organized than at least the last three years. It's time to dust the camera off, charge the battery and maybe get my eyes checked.

Thankfully the schedules printed, although there is a need to get another small cork board and some stick pins because those said schedules could disappear in a Wyoming snowstorm of white papers.

Not surprisingly, it has happened before.