Suffer the poor, 'overworked,' local sportswriters

We hoped that Spring was maybe here
Assuming we were in the clear
But Winter’s touch is always near,
Crouching behind a Canadian wall …
Then it STRIKES, like a-snowball

My reworking of the classic "Thunderball" James Bond theme by Tom Jones was necessitated by looking at the coming end-of-April and May sports schedule and lamenting the work Josiah Cuellar and I will be putting in over the coming 40 days or so (until the end of the school year, in particular). My coworker and I will be crunching down on more games than you can shake a stick at and will be busier than one-armed-paper-hangers for the foreseeable future, and it’s getting to be time to strap in the seatbelts because of the doggone snow and pervasive bad weather that ruins our schedule more-often-than-not.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not (necessarily) looking for sympathy here … because – after all – how can anyone feel sorry for two people who get the privilege of writing about sports for a living? But, golly, Mother Nature sure offered us a Northern Earth Day surprise last week, didn’t she? We had no less than four events to cover from Wednesday through Saturday of last week, and it all went PFFffttttt.

Thanks, Mom.

Now, we have to stack all those events into the coming weeks to accommodate district and regional match-ups to make way for the postseason and other various championships the kids have worked so hard to achieve. Seriously, I don’t think anybody understands the gravity of the position we are in here … not even me, and I try very hard to keep track of these things. But heavens, is it gonna be a busy month (bear with me a minute while I break it down for you:).

We’ve got a Dickinson High School varsity baseball game at Astoria Field and a varsity girls soccer match to cover at home tomorrow versus Bismarck Century at Dickinson State University, not-to-mention an away tennis match for DHS at Williston, and this Thursday Dickinson Trinity will be traveling to the Badlands Conference Track Meet in Bowman County that will feature more than a half-dozen area teams such as Killdeer, Mott-Regent/New England, Hettinger County, Bowman County and others.

Meanwhile, also this week, DHS’s softball team – of which Dickinson Trinity is a co-op member along with the baseball team’s composition that includes a few Titans – will be away at Minot on Tuesday and hosts Legacy High School at Bravera Field on Thursday, then hosts the Varsity Invitational this weekend over Friday and Saturday (a tournament that had to be rescheduled from last week due to the 2-inches of snow that ended up on the ground in the latter half of APRIL!).

From there, the DHS boys track team will be headed to Mandan for a varsity meet at the Starion Sports Complex, and the girls will be hosting the Varsity Invitational at the Biesiot Activities Center on Friday, while the girls varsity soccer team travels to Turtle Mountain and the boys baseball team heads to Williston, which also is on Friday.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL! ... The girls and boys varsity track and tennis teams will be in action on Saturday, with the runners hitting the ground in Bismarck against multiple teams at the Community Bowl starting at noon, while the tennis team hosts Bismarck High School starting at 10 a.m. And go ahead and shoehorn some golf in there for good measure on Tuesday at Fox Hills and Friday at Heart River Golf Course.

And lest I forget about the hard-working athletes at your local Dickinson State University: The men's baseball team hosts presentation for a four-game homestand with doubleheaders on Friday and Sunday and there will be a four-game set of Blue Hawks softball games on Saturday and Sunday away at Waldorf to close out their season AND the North Star Athletic Association Tournaments will be here next week and hosted in Dickinson for both sports.

Just for the record, that’s only the next week-and-a-half or so … you get my meaning about “busy”?

So, listen, on our home page you can find links to get a reduced-rate subscription that features 99-cents-per-month for an introductory three months and you need to get one (if you don’t already have one), or you need to tell your friends and neighbors that it’s worth it to give us a try. If for nothing other than sports – although Allison Engstrom, Jason O’Day and James Miller do an exemplary job of covering the news, too – this is the time to jump in and get a subscription.

Regardless, Josiah and I will be catching ourselves coming-and-going the next few weeks, so brace yourselves. Meanwhile, I’m gonna be outside in my off-time doing an un-rain and no-snow dance … so if you see a bald guy acting crazy on the sidewalk by our office at 31 Sims Street, pay him no mind.

There’s a method somewhere behind the madness, and it's gonna get insane quickly.

Gaylon Wm. Parker’s columns appear on Mondays in The Dickinson Press. The opinions expressed therein are those of the author and not-necessarily anybody else.