By MONTE DUTTON

Believe it or not, it once snowed several times a winter here. This is one aspect of climate change I do not regret. I’ve grown too old for snow. It’s all I can do to walk across a gravel parking lot in the dark.
Careful. Don’t get in a hurry.
I watched the 49ers and the Bills skating in a winter wonderland on Sunday night via the miracle of television, and like most fans, delighted in the weather since I wasn’t in it. The last two chilly Fridays at Wilder Stadium are about my speed.

It occurred to me that I once played football in the snow. I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 years young. Back in the days before junior-high duty called, most all my friends and I had our own uniforms. I remember my dad taking me and my brother to Crutchfield’s in Spartanburg to be fitted. I had a helmet that was heavy, sturdy and in the shape commonly used in 1956. That wasn’t so bad. It was just a few years before I was born.
My suspicion is that my helmet was on sale, but I loved it and dutifully painted it red.

My friends and I played pickup games in our front yard, which wasn’t nearly a regulation field. My brother and I called all our friends, and one Saturday, with three inches of snow on the ground, about two dozen showed up. The teams were chosen randomly on the basis of who showed up in white jerseys and who showed up in dark. If the numbers were uneven, either my brother or me, or both, would go fetch another.
We even kicked extra points. They were good if they went over the power wire.
It was great fun, which is why I remember it.
Can you imagine that happening today? My brother and I took turns running a phone bank.

Can I speak to Peter? … Peter, this is Monte. We’re playing football at my house in an hour. Put your uniform on and get over here. … Yeah, we’ll have hot chocolate.
Not one mother apparently said, Not in this weather you don’t, mister! The friends who had moms likely to bar such dangerous pastimes, we probably didn’t call.
Childhood was out on a frontier in those days. Nowadays the fun is virtual, I reckon. If kids carried on the way we did, litigation would be involved. Parents would be arrested.
I don’t know that times now are better or worse. What I know is it was fun, and you can’t beat fun.

It is hardly unusual for a new head coach to face a rebuilding program.

Off the women’s basketball team that won the Big South tournament title and a play-in game at the NCAA Tournament last season, Tiffany Sardin faced a tough task.
A 60-47 Queens University victory at Templeton Center on Monday evening left the Blue Hose with an 0-8 record. It wasn’t a classic, but it got better as it went along.
Jordyn Weaver pumped in 22 points and grabbed 10 rebounds for the Royals. Jermany Mapp added 14 points.

Gone by either graduation or transfer are last season’s better players. Tilda Sjokvist is at Missouri. Mara Neira joined head coach Alaura Sharp at Appalachian State. The top player back is senior Paige Kindseth, a Farmington, Minn., product, who averages 8.9 points and 7.0 rebounds.
Among the newcomers are six transfers and three freshmen. Refurbishing takes time.
The first quarter ended with the Royals up, 7-2. It could have been four. Kindseth hit a jump shot for what appeared to be the Hose’ first basket, but it was waved off for a shot-clock violation.

The Blue Hose scored the first points of the second 10 minutes, a Kishyah Anderson pull-up jumper. Queens (4-3) then scored the next 15 and cruised into halftime with a 30-14 bulge.
The Royals’ regime continued in the third quarter, which ended with a 46-26 advantage. PC saved face a bit in the final quarter, shaving seven points off the deficit.

Anderson’s 16 points marked her fifth double-figure scoring game of the season.
Kindseth pulled down a career-best 11 rebounds. Shelby Fiddler added three steals, which marked her best at PC and tied her career-high at Niagara.
The teams combined to hit 6/33 three-point attempts. Queens shot .421 overall to PC’s .300 and outrebounded the Blue Hose, 43-36.
The Blue Hose have eight days off before visiting North Carolina Central in Durham on Dec. 11, at 11 a.m.
Take a look at the stats here.

Javen Cook is the Laurens County Touchdown Club’s Player of the Week and not just because the Clinton Red Devils are the only ones still playing.
He’d have won it if it were Los Angeles County.
In a 31-14, third-round, Class 2A victory over Batesburg-Leesville, the diminutive dynamo carried the ball 24 times for 269 yards and three touchdowns. Cook averaged 11.2 yards per carry.
“Javen has a great work ethic,” stated his head coach, Corey Fountain. “His work in the weight room shows on Friday nights when he explodes down the field on big plays. He is a great young man on and off the field.”

Cook and Garrett Murphy of Laurens Academy have won the award twice.
The weekly Player of the Week, sponsored by Farm Bureau Insurance of Laurens County, continues as long as the games do. This Friday night Clinton (10-2) faces Fairfield Central (12-1) at Wilder Stadium for the Upstate championship.
The state championship game is on Thursday, Dec. 12, at South Carolina State’s Dawson Stadium at 2 p.m. The Low Country finalists are Barnwell (12-1) and Manning (11-1).
The TD Club will honor Cook on Jan. 8 at the Annual Banquet. Tickets are available for $20 in advance at the Laurens County Chamber of Commerce.

Presbyterian College quarterback Collin Hurst is the Pioneer Football League’s Freshman Offensive Player of the Year.
The red-shirt from Davie, Fla., helped PC to a 6-6 season that ended with four consecutive victories.
Hurst posted the best pass efficiency rating (154.84) of any quarterback in the conference, totaling over 2,300 passing yards and 22 touchdowns.
“I guess that I’ve fought tougher men, but I really can’t remember when.” – Shel Silverstein, “A Boy Named Sue”
Wellpilgrim.com is winding down the fall making a transition to the winter chill. The bounces of the balls are getting truer.

Times are changing. I am aware of how irrelevant what I do for a living has become and thus how unimportant my efforts are. The readers appreciate them, but there aren’t enough of them. I doubt there ever will be again.
It’s what I do. It’s what I know.
Support the advertisers. They are all fine people who want their businesses associated with honest coverage of local sports.
In the off chance you’d like to read my novels and other books, they’re available on Amazon and many prominent bookseller sites.

You can read them on your phones and other devices for a modest cost. I make a bit more if you purchase the actual books, but what I mainly want is for folks to read them.
Longer Songs, a collection of short stories that were based on songs I wrote, was published in 2017. I just read it for the first time since I wrote it, and it was better than I remembered. One of its purposes was to provide a sampler of my fiction. A download is only 99 cents, and the paperback is $7.99. You can’t afford not to read it, not that I’m objective.
Photo galleries are posted on Instagram @furmanatt and @laurenscountysports.
Thanks for putting up with me.