By MONTE DUTTON

It’s been a great football season for Clinton. It was a great one for Laurens Academy, a good one for Presbyterian College and a disaster for Laurens High.
At the beginning of the season, I thought the Raiders would have Laurens County’s most improved team. Now I think they will next year.
Many fans are commiserating the fact that the Red Devils must play for a state championship in Orangeburg on Thursday at 2 p.m.
You know me. I try to accentuate the positive. Football games are much easier to shoot in the daytime. The black backgrounds and floodlit foregrounds require lots of wee-hours adjustments, and auto-focus is less reliable.

Although it isn’t all about me, I’d rather drive to Orangeburg and back in the daytime. Also, I don’t have to get off work. It is my work.
In my first job, I had to both write about and shoot games. I’d take a picture and scribble what happened on a play. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. (By the way, does anyone actually do that in the shower?) Adjustments were made in a darkroom, and black and white was much harder than color. There was no autofocus. There was no digital. I don’t know how I did it.
For the next 25 years, I only took photos for amusement, and not often. Now I’m back to square one, and I’ve grown to enjoy it. Back then, I had to keep my own stats. Now, by the time I get home, a full stats book is in my email.

High-school games are like college games used to be. College games have changed. Well, most of them. Hunter Reid, Jordan Caskey, Julie Pare and Wesley Herring still do it the right way at Furman. It’s one of the reasons I so enjoy covering the Paladins. Another, of course, is that I went to school there.
I really can’t thank B.J. Gardner at Clinton and Philip Dean, who provides the Laurens stats, enough. They are proficient at what they do. Every week Patrick Nelson sends out a Clinton notes package that should be the envy of most colleges, but isn’t, or else that’s the way they’d still do it.

Today most colleges provide information as an auxiliary function. Some call it “directed” or “strategic” communications. It’s a positive take on “propaganda ministry.” I guess that was already taken.
In NASCAR, I used to compare it to entering the yearly soil-and-water conservation essay contest when I was 14. All entries were written from the same information pool. The person who won wrote it best. I can’t remember the last time a publicist proposed a feature angle. They keep it to themselves. I suspect they think of the media as competition to their websites.

I hope readers appreciate an honest account of what happens in the same way I hope voters will pay attention to anything other than the lies and distortions of TV ads and social-media posts. They take us back to childhood when we were spoonfed.
I hope it, but I can’t prove it.
I’ve developed some bad habits on the college beat. I don’t ask as many questions. I make an observation, and the coach or athlete responds. The college kids are more glib and thoughtful, undoubtedly because they are in college.
When a reporter makes an observation to a high-school athlete, he or she thinks it’s praise and says “thank you.” The high-school kid wants a question.

How did you feel when you caught that pass. What were you thinking? He makes me work. That’s what he ought to do.
Players learn the fundamentals first. I did, too. It’s still hard, but then again, I’m much older. Everyone, be he tinker, tailor or candlestick maker, compensates for age with experience.
I think I’m better now than I ever was, but then again, being old, I would. Few humans are objective about themselves.

Clinton High is going to play boys’ and girls’ basketball games at Union County on Wednesday evening. Though a significant portion of the boys’ team is tied up with this little football matter of winning the state championship, the girls are rolling along at 3-1 while the boys are 1-0.
The Red Devils were supposed to play in Laurens last Friday and at home against the Raiders this Friday. The former was postponed, and the latter is going to be.
They’ll catch up. Improved Laurens teams – the boys are 2-3, the girls 3-2 – are willing to take on Clinton at its best, or, at least, at full strength.

Football was fantastic. Clinton’s 32-21 victory over Fairfield Central was a wildly entertaining, though chilly, evening.

Basketball was fantastic, though my truck wouldn’t start on Saturday morning and I had to watch the Princeton-Furman game on TV and write about it via electronic means. I really hate I wasn’t there to watch it.

I try to make the best. Since Furman’s back-and-forth 69-63 victory was at noon, I only missed blowout college football games.

Texas-Georgia and SMU-Clemson were exceptional football games. Everything worked out, as it usually does when I do the best I can, given the circumstances.

Quite a few are complaining about the college playoff system, which would be the same if the committee picked two or 64. Four is probably enough, but 12 keep all the constituencies — big schools, smaller schools, TV, sponsors, almighty dollar — happy.

Spartanburg Christian pulled out a 50-45 victory over Laurens Academy (3-1) in girls’ basketball on Friday night in spite of 19 points from Braylee Burke. Brooklyn Senn added eight and Abby Howard seven for the homestanding Crusaders.
Delaney Caldwell led the Warriors with 24.
Spartanburg Christian also won the boys’ game, 63-51, over the Crusaders (3-1). Braydon Burke scored 30 points in a losing cause, hitting 12/28 shots. For the Warriors, Eli Campbell scored 23, Lake Wagner 19 and Luke Davis 10.
Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.” – Mark Twain

Wellpilgrim.com is winding 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.

I read the entire Bible, and one result was Crazy of Natural Causes (2015), which is not an inspirational novel. It’s something of a response to the hypocrisy I perceived in reading Christ’s words and comparing them to the way they are sometimes taught.
Photo galleries are posted on Instagram @furmanatt and @laurenscountysports.
Thanks for putting up with me.