Tag: usd

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Ballin’ in South Dakota

By John Andrews

Carroll Hardy of Sturgis was one of South Dakota’s noteworthy athletes.

This week I got my registration form for the annual history conference in Pierre. I’ve never attended, but this year’s focus on our sports history looks especially interesting. Conferences like these love to focus on the political or economic aspects of our history, which are important. But cultural and social components like athletics are just as important, and sometimes overlooked.

One of the speakers is Mel Antonen, who grew up across the street from the baseball field in Lake Norden and became a national baseball writer. He’s going to talk about how baseball games in Yankee Stadium and South Dakota are alike. I’ve heard the presentation before, and it’s well worth hearing again. Not to steal his thunder, but he’ll probably tell the story of covering Cal Ripken when he was going through contract negotiations in Baltimore. He ultimately decided to stay with the Orioles, and when Antonen asked why he turned down more money and bigger markets, Ripken said,”Mel, you just don’t understand baseball in a small town.”

South Dakota has a rich sports tradition. A few years back we asked longtime Yankton sports writer Hod Nielsen to compile a list of 12 of our greatest athletes. That’s not to be read,”the 12 greatest athletes in South Dakota history.” It’s simply a list of impressive athletes that Nielsen saw during his decades of work for the Yankton Press & Dakotan.

He chose all-time greats like Billy Mills, the Pine Ridge native who won the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympics.”Smokey Joe” Mendel briefly held the world record in the 100-meter-dash when he ran it in 9.5 seconds as a senior at Yankton College. Sturgis native Carroll Hardy made an impact on professional football, but he’s probably best known as the only man ever to pinch-hit for the great Ted Williams.

And South Dakota’s athletes continue to make history this week. The University of South Dakota women’s basketball team is in the WNIT for the first time. They welcome Drake to the DakotaDome in Vermillion Thursday at 7 p.m. Also Thursday, South Dakota State University’s men’s team makes its first ever appearance in the NCAA tournament. The Jacks play Baylor at 6:30 p.m., on truTV. And SDSU’s women, in the tournament for the fourth consecutive year, play Purdue Saturday at 12:30.

If you’re near a television or radio, watch and listen. You might hear names we’ll be talking about 50 years from now at another history conference.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

State-U, Version 2: No Frozen Critters

By John Andrews

The newest addition to the Brookings landscape is a friendly jab from Vermillion.

Are you ready to renew the athletic rivalry between the state’s two largest universities? It appears one school is.

A friend recently sent me a photo that I think is the first salvo in the soon-to-be-resurrected SDSU-USD rivalry. A huge red billboard recently went up along Interstate 29 near Daktronics in Brookings. It shows a coyote streaking after a rabbit, and the tagline reads,”Have an old friend for dinner.” It’s creative. It’s boldly placed in the heart of Jackrabbit Country. It’s also a sign that the rivalry many of us grew up with will be renewed with zest after nine years of dormancy.

SDSU and USD were spirited in-state rivals since 1889, when the football teams first played to a 6-6 tie. Then in 2003, SDSU announced plans to reclassify from the NCAA’s Division II to Division I, ending contests between the schools. USD made the move a few years later, and now both schools are again in the same athletic conferences, ensuring games every year. The rivalry resumes this winter, when USD visits Frost Arena on Jan. 12 for a men’s basketball game. Football follows next fall, with a game in Brookings on Nov. 17, 2012, the date advertised on the billboard.

I was a student at SDSU from 1998 to 2002. There was excitement all day when the USD basketball team was scheduled to play in Frost Arena. We’d arrive a full hour before the doors opened. When staff finally let us in, we’d sprint through the halls, gunning for the front row, half court seats. Once the game began, we’d keep one eye on the court and another scanning both student sections, trying to find the student who would inevitably toss a frozen coyote or jackrabbit onto the court.

Seemingly every alumnus has a frozen animal story. There’s a chapter full of them in Amy Dunkle’s The College on the Hill. Harry Forsyth, SDSU’s longtime athletic director, remembered finding a frozen coyote hanging from the rafters of the Barn, the campus field house where basketball games were once played.”They were going to lower it and play ‘Taps’ after the game,” he recalled.”We put a couple of big football tackles on the pulley to make sure nothing happened.”

The most serious incident happened during a game at Frost on Feb. 7, 1976, when an overzealous SDSU fan threw a 55-pound frozen coyote onto the court. It struck SDSU cheerleader Margie Fiedler in the head. Fiedler suffered a concussion, was hospitalized in Minneapolis and missed three weeks of school. She later said doctors told her the impact had shifted her brain inside her skull.

Hopefully nothing similar happens when the schools meet again. It’s simply time to move beyond chucking frozen wildlife at each other. We should embrace this renewed rivalry with civility and sportsmanship. And somebody at SDSU should get to work on a billboard near Exit 26.