The 99th issue of Hail Varsity is off to press and will be arriving in mailboxes and on newsstands in the days ahead. To preview with April issue, here’s the Letter from the Managing Editor, Brandon Vogel, in Volume 8 Issue 4. Make sure you don’t miss an issue by subscribing today.
Nebraska football is off to the offseason and Husker basketball is embarking upon a new era as April winds down and the start of summer approaches. These could be considered lean times in the college sports calendar, but they’re sort of filled with unusual excitement in Nebraska.
Let’s start with football. The Huskers played another spring game in front of another sell-out crowd and, most important to Scott Frost, got out of the spring session relatively healthy. To examine what we learned over Nebraska’s 15 practices in March and April, I asked each of our writers to explore an idea or impression they took away from the spring in short form. I liked the way that turned out. It’s something of a buffet of ideas on where Nebraska football stands entering the summer.
While the addition of Fred Hoiberg may feel like old news in a digital world, this was our first chance to cover it in print. That’s an advantage in some regards. It offers an opportunity to really explore something beyond just the news of the day and Derek Peterson delivers with his look at how this new era of Nebraska basketball is being constructed. And putting the new basketball coach on the cover was a no-brainer, even with spring football as an option. I like to view Hail Varsity covers as a way to mark major events in Husker history and Nebraska is only hiring Hoiberg once (though Doc Sadler might caution me against making such assumptions).
It’s not all offseason, though. Nebraska baseball, as of this writing, was contending for the top spot in the Big Ten. Kyle Kardell, in his first spring covering the baseball beat, makes his magazine debut in this issue to keep you up to speed on everything happening on the diamond.
While the end of the school year can feel like things are winding down, for us things are picking up as we really dive in to the 2019 Hail Varsity Yearbook, available in June. It our biggest issue each year and my favorite project. It requires our most creative efforts, deep analysis and singular storytelling. That’s an exciting challenge. When we’re in Yearbook mode, it never feels like things are winding down. Rather, they are ratcheting up.
Things feel similar for Nebraska right now. There’s buzz around the football program and high expectations for the second season under Frost. Basketball, obviously, has received a jolt of energy with the new hire. Baseball has showed enough promise that a conference title and postseason run are still possible.
You can view this time of year as the “slow time” typically, but from our perspective it simply looks like a particularly good time to be a Husker fan.
