Gotta couple of topics I’d like to touch on today, including football in the fall and our Huskerland preview publication.

First things first. Bravo to the NSAA for its decision to fire up fall practice on Aug. 10. Clearly this was a cautious first step but one that has the support of nearly all (and I mean, like, all) the people I have spoken to across the state over the past five weeks. These are folks inside the game - coaches, players, administrators - and also fans and support of our high school games and the children who play them.

There was a touch of irony the NSAA decision came down on the same day California moved its high school football back to January. Several states have put their high school football on hold, and Texas is considering some sort of split decision where football would be played in some places and not in others, schedules TBD. Messy, that’s what that is.

In my travels since the first of July I have heard of zero weight room positive cases; doesn’t mean there hasn’t been one I guess, though I’d think I’d have been told that. One school visit of my was cancelled because a student, not a football player, had been tested positive after returning from a wedding but I also received word from the school’s coach no players were diagnosed and after the student had been placed in quarantine the cost was clear.

Really like that approach. Don’t shut the whole works down, rather deal with the situation on a case-to-case basis. To me that makes more sense than shutting down a whole school, community, football program.

As for schools and the student who attend them administrations and school boards continue to wrestle with what’s the right think to do. I know this much, what is right in some school districts is not right for others. Many others. Like our NSAA board there are a lot of people in command who in difficult positions regarding when and how to open their school but I guess I fall on the side of having children in the building if at all possible. If at all possible.

It was good to see the NSAA make their announcement well ahead of the projected start of practice, knowing full well that what is true today might not be true on Aug. 10. Or Aug. 1. But you have to start somewhere and giving fall sports practice the green flag - not to go all NASCAR but it might have been more of a yellow flag - was a great decision.

I did not leave Merrick County, where I live, for 12 weeks starting back with the boys state basketball tournament. Since I broke the seal I’ve been to over 40 schools for campus visits from Scottsbluff to Omaha and I will tell you there is a lot of optimism and positive momentum out there surrounding high school football and it’s immediate future. Kids are working hard, coaches are riding herd, and with some reservation it feels like business as usual.

Except, I guess, for the part where I use a dab of hand sanitizer before and after each visit.

So to paraphrase the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, “that’s one small step for the NSAA, one giant leap for high school sports.” Now let’s get our soil samples and get back football.

* Speaking of football I need to bring you up to date on Huskerland Prep Report’s annual high school football publication. We enter our 31st year covering Nebraska high school sports and our 25th publishing a football preview but due to some circumstances out of our control - and like basically all of our lives dictated by the national coronavirus pandemic - our preview will have a different look in 2020.

The first four years we published a Huskerland football preview it was a newsprint product. Then along came my friends, and yours too, School District Publications. During a phone call to my office in May of 2000 from my friend Marty Lewis, the legal representative for School District Publications, he told me their company would like to partner with me on a state football preview magazine. Tell me more, Marty.

He went on to say that if I provided the content - stories, photos, etc. - they would print the magazine for free and send me copies to distribute to our subscribers. Keep in mind my friends are a big-time publishing house - you go to an NBA game and grab a program, my guys published it - so I knew this would be a great upgrade for Huskerland and our readers.

And since they were providing us the magazines for free we never charged our subscribers for them; in fact, they cost us money due to the fairly hefty increase in postage to mail them. (If you’ve ever held one of those bad boys in your hands you know what I mean.)

Fast forward to March 2020 and I am into my second month of working on the preview, like usual. Then the pandemic hits. This is a good time to mention School District Publications and its sister companies are based in Manhattan and Elmont, New York. Basically the epicenter of the USA outbreak. Long story short they are still not completely back on their feet back at headquarters and as a result will not be able to publish our magazine for this season.

Word about us not having a preview magazine published didn’t come down until late June - by which time we had much of the preview completed - which left us with two choices, three I guess:

1. Plunge ahead and prepare the preview as usual. That meant redesigning the whole thing, which is time consuming, but at least we keep our history intact. And we’d need to find a way to get it published.

2. Publish our all of our preseason stuff exclusively on our Rivals.com website. Love that website but you can’t put it in your scrapbook.

3. Don’t publish a preview at all. (Like I said, we really had only two options, IMO.)

So, we will be publishing the Huskerland Prep Report 2020 football preview in tabloid newsprint style; sort of our weekly product on steroids, if you will. Our plan is to print and mail on August 6 with our longtime partners at the Grand Island Independent doing the honors. Thanks, boys.

Then what? I’ve had that question asked a couple of times here lately and here’s what we are going to do: keep publishing. Once the season starts we will publish Huskerland for our subscribers on our usual weekly basis and if the season is suspended we will keep printing. Like football this fall it might look a little different - tough to keep printing stats with no games - but we will still find a way to serve our subscribers, right through our yearend edition in mid-December.

Sorry that got so long but I felt like you all needed to know a little bit about our situation. We have enjoyed over three decades of providing coverage of Nebraska high school football and we hope you are on board for 2020. You can get signed up by calling our office toll free at 800-323-3929 and this year, more than any other since our first one back in 1990, we’d sure appreciate your support.