New view for start of summer

It wasn’t a view that I found appealing, but it was certainly one that got me to thinking.

Minutes earlier, my wife, Jodi, and I were on our way home from church and getting ready for a busy Sunday afternoon that included a graduation party and a birthday party.

Then my wife slowed to turn and the driver behind us didn’t notice the blinking of our signal.

The rest, as they say, is history. All involved were OK. A couple vehicles were smashed, probably beyond repair, but they can be replaced.

Life goes on, thankfully.

I walked into work Tuesday afternoon, and I realized that my view on the sports world had to be temporarily altered.

For the first time since last August – and for the first time since I became sports editor last fall – there wasn’t a long list of high school games that I had to budget into the section.

In fact, there weren’t any prep sports on the schedule, and there won’t be any until August, save for the SVM All-Star Classic basketball games next Thursday. The girls game is at 5 p.m. and the boys will follow that at Sauk Valley Community College. (I am not above a shameless plug.)

I won’t lie that I had feelings of equal parts relief and trepidation about the reprieve in the prep sports action.

The school year is a grind for all of us here in the SVM sports department, and it feels very much like I did Sunday after impact when we hit the ditch and then rolled over.

But with high school sports, you just keep rolling from one game to the next, one story to the next, one season to the next.

Needless to say, a break is nice.

But it is also frightening, for it is my job to make sure that the section has local content in it every day.

Without that constant presence of local games, it means we have to look around a little harder for stories.