Consider this an update of sorts. Maybe not as great as Dennis Miller doing the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, but still.

Here we are in the middle of June and the fun never stops, especially if you are out for a varsity sport. (And to be fair, if you are out for band, or dance, or basically any other extra curricular activity.) Last week I made a quick lap around greater Omaha, stopping at Douglas County West, Omaha Skutt, Omaha North and Creighton Prep, and when you pulled into each of the parking lots it was like school was still in session. Lots going on.

Which is part of what is complicating my Huskerland life these days. For those of you who either have never subscribed or simply never heard of the Huskerland Prep Report football preview magazine we publish, each year it is scheduled for completion in the second week of July. That allows three weeks for publication, courtesy of our friends in New York City, University Sports Publications, and delivery by our friends in the United States Postal System.

Key word in that very long sentence: scheduled.

A couple of things, most importantly about the format of our 2021 preview. As this is written it is still up in the air if USP will be publishing the magazine in 2021; it did not last summer because its offices were closed due to COVID. In the months since my friends have been playing catch up and it is not clear if we will make cut. If not we will publish the preview in newsprint form, like we did last year.

Besides the look and feel of the preview there is one more dramatic difference in their publication. It won’t affect you but as for me if we publish in magazine form I have about a month to finish our project; if we publish in newsprint I have an added three weeks before completion.

And I could use the added three weeks.

While I have the previews written - except for the 11 which were not returned - there is still the Top 225, the player features,and all the rest of the book, including sizing and processing about a trillion photos. Great for the look of the preview, not so great when you are sizing photo number 111 or 222 or whatever. I’ll live, this is just an update.

There will be 22 player profiles in the preview, give or take, and I have conducted the interviews for 11 of them. The vast majority of the balance involve players who live west of Grand Island, and that’s where all this summertime activity comes into play.

See, many years by the time school is out I have completed all the interviews or at least something like, say, 80 percent or more. Due to some outside complications that didn’t happen this year and means I need to schedule these interviews during the summertime, when kids are all over the place at camps or working at their jobs. Tracking them down and having them available for interviews is more difficult this year than ever before.

My favorite part of the Huskerland year is my trip “out there” to the schools/players/coaches located west of Grand Island. I try to schedule them all for a single trip and while that can be taxing it is fun and makes sense for me in terms of time away from home. That is still my plan but in recent days I have already had one day’s worth of campus visits flame out due to schedule complications so I’m getting a little nervous.

The good news is I have a trip scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) where I will be visiting Grand Island Northwest, Aurora, Central City (weird, since we no longer live there), Cross County and York. I will be conducting a couple of those 11 preview feature story interviews and shooting a bunch of those goofy little videos that have become a staple of the campus visit. It will be fun, but I still need to make two more rather extensive trips to make it where I want to go in advance of the completion of our preview publication.

So we are plugging along and when I get some clarity on the publication of our preview I will notify you both here and on Twitter. What is in a Huskerland high school football preview magazine you ask? Well...

* Team previews for all the teams in the state, all 275 of them, less the 11 who failed to return a form.

* Those 22 player features, give or take, spotlighting players from all four corners of our state.

* Preseason Top Tens in each class, including a fun (ugh) little comparison of how close last year’s preseason top tens were to the one we published at the end of the season.

* Preseason all-state teams.

* A look at the Top 30 games of the year, always a fun exercise.

And, if things work as they should, the regular season schedules for all the high school football teams in the state.

If you or someone you know would like to subscribe to Huskerland Prep Report you can sure email me at jensenpub@hamilton.net or call our (home) office at 531-375-2783.

Besides our preview, which can be purchased separately, a subscription to Huskerland also includes 12 regular season issues that are delivered weekly from Week 1 through the postseason. Cost for all this is $35.00, a pretty good deal to get a full season’s worth of coverage unlike any you will find anywhere else.