Travel always an issue in Panhandle prep hoops coverage

It seems like it was just yesterday that I first stepped into these offices and began my beat on the news side.

Today, I find myself at the sports desk, while still keeping an eye on certain items on the news beat.

Whereas I parachuted into this slot at the end of our fall sports coverage, winter sports season — always a busy time — has arrived.

And after a few weeks at it here, I have determined with certainty that basketball is a much different beat than I have previously experienced.

Back home in southern Illinois, I rarely found myself traveling any further than a half-hour away from the office during the regular season in basketball.

Heck, even a game “inside the county” wasn’t any further than 10 miles away. Not so in the Panhandle, where you’re dealing with a 40-mile round trip when talking about Cheyenne County.

Tonight, we’ll be traveling to Alliance to cover the Sidney High School Raiders’ boys and girls games, but for the most part, for deadline purposes, we’ll be heading out in the main coverage area.

Typically, the smaller schools don’t have to travel as many miles as SHS does to take on those teams of their own size. Sometimes, it means short school days and even longer nights.

So far, we’ve been able to get a large majority of the Friday night games in for Saturday’s editions, thanks to the cooperation of coaches and contributing photographers Craig Maas, Joe Arterburn and Donna Wiedeburg.

Through their efforts, we were able to provide not only game stories for last Saturday’s editions, but we also had accompanying photos from each venue.

We’ll try and keep things going here up as the holidays approach.

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Congrats once again to Sidney High School’s Karissa Segelke, who last week signed a letter of intent to attend Concordia University on a dual basketball/outdoor track and field scholarship.

The college and Segelke look to be a good fit. Segelke could be a bit behind the curve with track, as most of the athletes will have conducted indoor workouts by the time basketball season winds down.

But that won’t stop Segelke.

Though I have been at this desk for a short time, I have heard nothing but good things about her work ethic. That should be more than enough to carry her through the daily regimen.

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With all the movement going on last week in the college football coaching ranks, Nebraska’s Bo Pelini came up a couple times in the rumor mill at Tennessee. Of course, fans were flooding talk shows, many of them clamoring for Pelini’s outster.

As a Tennessee fan myself (enter punch line here), it is good advice to be careful of what you wish for.

Sure, everyone wants a national championship and to gain at least retain BCS status. Then again, those same factions also want heads to roll when things fall apart.

That’s precisely what happened at Tennessee with Phillip Fulmer.

Fulmer, whose 1998 Volunteers won the inaugural BCS championship, slowly lost control of his program and the ability to compete for top recruits.

Following his firing in 2008, UT has lost ground after a failed one-night stand with Lane Kiffin, and three painstaking campaigns with Derek Dooley.

Knoxville has fallen off the charts as a destination choice of big-name coaches.

Tennessee was able to lure Cincinnati coach Butch Jones away from Ohio, and, at the last second, he also turned down an offer from Colorado.

Nonetheless, fun times in Knoxville are over. Tennessee is no longer a “dream job” in the grand scheme of things. Losing six, seven games a season are the trend, and the thought of attaining a bowl game of merit is years down the road.

The current strongholds of the SEC (Alabama, LSU, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and yes, even instate “rival” Vanderbilt) don’t appear to be falling off any time soon) is likely to hurt Jones’ recruiting efforts.

Pelini shouldn’t have such problems in the Big Ten, and will be able to recruit well inside the conference.

That said, even if Pelini has a few hiccups here and there — and the Huskers’ lop-sided body-slam loss to Wisconsin in the championship game surely stung — folks shouldn’t be so apt to pull the trigger.

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Well, the Peyton Manning doubters are long gone from Denver, and even Las Vegas books are encouraged.

As soon as John Elway rolled the dice and made the deal to acquire Manning, the Broncos odds of winning the Super Bowl dropped from a Tim Tebow-ish 75-1 to as low as 8-1 in some corners.

Now, with an eight-game winning streak and a 10-3 record, Denver has dipped to as low as 4-1 with the oddsmakers, and their odds currently stand a click higher at 9-2.

Those numbers will change after Sunday’s game in Baltimore, for sure.