Kirk Danielson

All year we’ve done stories about SDSU varsity sports and the student athletes who compete in the name of the Yellow and Blue. Intramural sports have found their way into a couple of issues, but as the days grow longer and our focus moves outdoors, it is again time to recognize the athlete inside us all. What do SDSU students actually do for sports and activities? Where do our interests lie, and what do we do outside when old man winter subsides and produces the finest days of the year?

We’d like to hear your summer sports stories. What do you do for exercise or fun? Vote in our online poll at www.sdsucollegian.com, and send your best summer sports stories to [email protected]. I’m sure someone on this campus has hooked a buddy while fishing. We’ll print the best, and laugh at the rest.

To get the ball rolling:

A few years back, a bunch of my friends agreed to join me in a small-town softball tournament. Being a long-time fantasy baseball player, I figured out a whole game plan. We even had a practice, if that’s what you call hitting the batting cages in Sioux Falls for about an hour. Now, maybe making our best athlete (who I later learned had never played softball) the shortstop was a mistake. Perhaps it was a bad idea going into the game with a right fielder admittedly afraid of the ball. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a team meeting downtown the night before, but either way … it all ended in catastrophe.

Our team, complete with our own personalized entrance themes, amassed six whole hits and one run in two games. Being run-ruled, being behind by more than 20 runs after the second inning in both games wasn’t actually the depressing part. When the other team’s third base coach hit a stand-up triple barefoot, I exploded. And, if your going to lose a softball game, 24-0, you may as well be ejected for making obscene remarks about the umpire’s mother. Ahhh … good times, good times.

In another story, two years ago, a group of my friends formed a weekly kickball game. Now if stories about chubby guys trying to handle a dripping wet kickball don’t amuse you … stop reading. It was raining heavily on a Sunday afternoon, but we had all shown up and really had no other plans. So, play commenced. Catching a lopsided kickball can be tricky, but when the ground is like a slip and slide, and the kickball itself is slipperier than a baby seal, hilarity ensues.

Now I don’t know how it’s possible that a rather, let’s say curvaceous, fellow can slip and fall four times en route to a homerun – except that the overall ineptitude of seven other individuals to catch up to such a beefy figure probably had something to do with it. The moral of the story: If you play kickball in the rain, you will end up with a drenched derri