Feb. 6—JAMESTOWN — Bismarck Legacy was up 10 points on the Blue Jay girls basketball team in the second half.

The Sabers couldn't hold onto the lead.

"We put up a strong team win, showing resilience and composure after falling behind .... in the second half," said JHS head coach Andy Skunberg.

The Blue Jays not only came back but ended up defeating Legacy 61-54 Friday night. Final stats were not available when The Jamestown Sun went to press.

Jamestown is now 6-6 in the West Region standings. The next game for the Jays is scheduled for Feb. 10 against Minot. Tipoff is set for 7 p.m. at Jerry Meyer Arena.

"Facing a well-coached Legacy squad that played with relentless effort, we responded with grit on both ends of the floor," Skunberg said. "The performance was one as coaches we are really proud of, while also serving as a reminder that continued improvement is needed in all areas as the team prepares for a challenging week ahead."

Feb. 6—The Irish goodbye is the most effective strategy I've found for exiting a social situation.

For those who are unaware, the explanation is simple — you just leave. It's that easy.

Maybe it's ducking out the side door of a building where everyone's gathered near the front, maybe it's dialing up an Uber to secretly take you away from an afterparty, maybe it's just deciding enough is enough and it's time to leave.

It works wonders, but there is one potential hazard. There's always the danger of that one person seeing you leave, who then announces your departure to everyone else and thus spoils the perfect escape plan.

In this case, I am both people.

By the time you read this, my time as the Aiken Standard sports editor will be over. After more than 11 years on staff full-time, not to mention my years as a part-timer before that, it's finally time to step aside. And I owe entirely too many thanks to too many people to silently walk out the side door one last time.

It was not a decision that was made lightly. When I took this job in December of 2014, I swore this was the only place I'd ever cover local sports. That's not because I thought I wouldn't do a good job elsewhere, but more so because I knew there was no other place in the world I'd be more invested in my coverage than here in Aiken.

I grew up here. I went to school here. I played sports here. I hoped my coaches wouldn't report my scores to this very paper. I grabbed the sports section every day when I came home from school, noted aloud how the paper favored our rival and hated us and mustered every bit of creative energy I had to call it the Sub-Standard. As it turns out, those ideas are both timeless.

I remember coming home from football games on Friday nights and rushing to turn on one of the local news channels to see how all of the other games went — back when you couldn't just get real-time updates live on your phone — and then reading the recaps in the next morning's paper. As it turns out, guys like Rob Gantt and Kenton Makin were teaching me how to do the job before I even knew it.

After tooling around on various hot-take blogs, thinking I was going to be the next Rick Reilly, I answered an ad in the paper heading into the 2009 season because the Standard was in dire need of help — longtime readers may remember that was the season we sent teams of two out to every single local football game, netbooks in hand, to provide live online stat updates from kickoff to the final whistle.

I couldn't have gotten luckier with my assignment from the great Cam Huffman. I was paired with the late legend Rob Novit, my first mentor in this business that became my career, and our team to cover was Williston-Elko. He drove and took photos, and I kept the stats and wrote the stories, most of them from his passenger seat as we drove back much earlier than the others after a running clock in the second half because the Blue Devils were so dominant during a 14-0 season that culminated in the Class A, Division II state championship.

Maybe it's only fitting that my 16th season — I missed 2010 due to illness — covering high school football ended with Strom Thurmond bringing home the Class AA crown.

So much happened in between. Coaches became friends. Friends and classmates became coaches. Kids I covered as high-schoolers became friends as adults. More recently, in a jarring "this is 40" wake-up call, my friends' kids started showing up on varsity rosters.

Some of the best stories to write were about our state champions — shoutout to the North Augusta girls' basketball team for giving me plenty of practice on that front. I've been lucky enough to have written about state champions, national champions, world champions, current professionals and future ones, games with 30 spectators and ones with closer to 100,000.

One of the biggest perks for a sports writer working in this part of the world is the opportunity to cover the Masters Tournament, and the adrenaline rush that comes from writing that final-round story on Sunday in the Augusta National media building is hard to beat — but the same can be said for absolute madhouses like the state semifinals between the Ridge Spring-Monetta and Wagener-Salley football teams in 2019, the Barnwell and Silver Bluff football teams in 2021 and the Aiken and South Aiken volleyball teams in 2022. And that's just a small sample.

My favorite stories to write, though, were the hundreds of college signing stories I've written over the years. I think it's fair to say I've seen more dreams come true than a ticket-taker at Disney World, and that's the entire reason to get into this business on the local level. Sure, the high-level events carry a different type of prestige, but getting to document someone from your community that may be the first from their family to go to college, one carrying on a family legacy, maybe thought they'd never go to college, maybe thought they'd never get to play again — that carries a hell of a lot more weight than someone we don't know winning a title that happened to be awarded in our area.

I owe countless thanks to countless people. News outlets only stay in business, and they only continue to employ their writers, if people read. I cannot say enough how much I appreciate every single eyeball.

To Cam Huffman, Noah Feit, Jeremy Timmerman, Eric Russell and Nick Terry, it was an honor and a privilege to sit alongside you in that newsroom working all of those late nights that never really felt like work because we got along so well and shared so many laughs.

To Melissa Hanna, I could not have asked for a more welcoming first boss in the newsroom. To Larry Taylor, there's no one I'd rather stress out with late on a Saturday when everything decides to go wrong at the worst possible time.

To John Boyette, there's no one I'd rather work for — period, paragraph, end of story. I look forward to seeing you again at Palmetto Golf Club, at Whiskey Alley and at Nacho Mama's — preferably sooner rather than later.

To Mike Dawson, most of this is your fault. Keeping that column I wrote bashing Notre Dame football 20 years ago folded up in your glovebox to show to your friends only encouraged me to keep doing this. Go figure, I got it from the best storyteller I know.

Anyone who ever trusted me to tell your story, called in a score, texted in stats, emailed a tip, tagged a tweet, forwarded a Facebook post, shared a story elsewhere and, yes, even reached out to complain — thank you. Our coverage area is a big one, especially during the years I was operating as a one-man shop and greatly struggled to figure out how to divvy up my time between three counties' worth of high schools and a Division II university, so every little bit of information I received to help me do my job better and shine a brighter light on our local student-athletes was greatly appreciated — even if I didn't sound so enthusiastic on some of those less-than-happy calls.

I'm not going anywhere. I'll still be here in my hometown, just not as a full-time sports writer anymore. I'm looking forward to enjoying nights, weekends and holidays with my wife and our dogs, and I'll always be glad to see our readers out in public.

Feel free to say hello. And I promise I won't leave without saying goodbye.