Rick Holtz is one of the co-owners of the Nance County Journal. Read his column each week in the newspaper and on the website.
Hello friends!
The Nance County Journal is pleased to announce that this week is the first week of the annual football contest.
If you turn your newspaper over to page 8, you will find the week one games hidden within the ads of our 16 sponsors. I say hidden, but you don’t have to look too deeply. The games are listed at the top of each ad.
So here is how it works. You pick the winner of 16 college football games. Fill out your entry form and drop it off at the NCJ Worldwide Headquarters, conveniently located at 420 3rd St., in Fullerton. You can also drop the entry form in the mail, sending it to P.O. Box 10, Fullerton, NE 68638.
We do limit one entry per person, per week. But everyone in your family can submit their own entry. Just fill our a separate entry form.
Since deadlines are REALLY important in the newspaper world, let’s talk about deadlines. Each week you will have a week to get your entry turned in. This week’s entry form is for next week’s games. All entry forms must be turned in by noon on the Wednesday following publication.
Each week the person who picks the most correct games will win a $25 prize. We will pay the prize out as either a gift card or you can extend your NCJ subscription (the choice is your’s).
The football contest will run for 12 weeks. The final entry form will appear in the Nov. 8 edition of the NCJ.
At the conclusion of the contest all entry forms (winners and losers) will be entered into a drawing for a $100 grand prize.
Weekly winners and the grand prize winner will be announced in the NCJ.
Make sure you get your entry form in before the deadline. Late entries will not be accepted.
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I’VE BEEN PLAYING with football pick contests at my different newspapers for close to 15 years now.
We’ve had picks similar to the version we are playing this year in this newspaper, but my favorite was when the newspaper staff would pick the winner of local high school football games.
Our staff wasn’t the biggest, but between the six of us sports writers there was a lot of sports coverage experience. There were guys who had been covering local high school games since the 1970s. Those were the guys you would go to to pick their brains on the different historical aspects of the game. They knew all the historical stats and a couple of them had the head-to-head match ups going back decades. One of my sports writers actually is one of the stat guys for the NFL on Fox.
I didn’t always win at the end of the season, but I was usually in the top 2 or 3. And the final week was always the deciding factor. You’d have to make a bold prediction if you wanted to make up ground if you were trailing, or you would play it safe if you were the picker ahead.
We didn’t pick for a cash prize, but there may or may not have been a six pack drink of the winner’s choice at the end of the season to whoever won our contest.
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THIS WEEK MARKS the beginning of crazy sports schedules and covering various teams a couple nights a week.
This year will be year two for Calvin, my soon to be teenage son. Last year he got his feet wet taking stats for me at football games and he even started taking pictures during basketball season.
As much as I love going out and covering sports, I admit that the drive with Calvin is my favorite part of Friday nights covering football.
He asks a lot of deep questions and after we talk about the things that really matter the conversation always devolves into comics, cartoons and video games.
My goal this year is to get him to do a little writing too. He’s comfortable behind the camera and taking stats. Let’s see if we can get him to talk to a coach and write the game story.
Probably not, but a dad and dream.
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THE HEAT HAS been throwing sports schedules for a loop.
Multiple events have been changed or postponed to later in the season. I’m writing this at 6 p.m. on Monday and the temperature is 100 degrees outside.
The good news is that the forecast for Friday is only in the mid 80s and the temperature could fall to right around the 70s before kickoff.
Perfect time for the weather to change.
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BE SURE TO check out this week’s sports page to see who was selected as the NCJ Athletes of the Week. This week we had to go with two girls because the guys don’t start competition until this week. Going forward we will have one boy and one girl selected each week (unless we have a weird week where no boy teams compete or no girls teams compete, but that usually won’t happen until the end of a season, if at all. Good luck to all athletes!
Rick Holtz is one of the co-owners of the Nance County Journal. Read his column each week in the newspaper and on the website.