How patient are you?
Not enough to use Airline Drive unless absolutely necessary, or temptation wins for shopping and dining?
Not enough to go on a waiting list at a restaurant?
Not enough to get into a line more than 3-4 deep at the post office, the drivers license bureau or at the checkout in a store?
Sam Burns admittedly struggles with his patience, but he has learned the hills of Augusta National and said patience was vital to his success last weekend. He’s got two T7th finishes in the last three major championships and as he hovered near or at the top of the Masters leaderboard, CBS and Golf Channel (I just didn’t watch enough ESPN coverage, despite Marty Smith, Andy North and Scott Van Pelt) announcers said he looks primed to capture a major title sooner than later.
Just be patient.
Jay Johnson is trying very, very hard to be patient with this year’s LSU baseball roster. He has only to look back two years – in between the Tigers’ national championship season, when halfway through the SEC schedule, the 2024 team was 3-12 and had dropped all five conference series, then rallied to go 10-5 in SEC games, 4-1 in the SEC Tournament and one extra-inning loss from a Super Regional.
That historical note won’t register with him as he watches LSU being erratic on defense, inconsistent at the plate and shaky on the bump.
Louisiana Tech’s administration has been patient navigating its move to the Sun Belt Conference. Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports reports Tech and Conference USA are finally near agreement on a deal allowing the Bulldogs (and Lady Techsters) to escape that declining league.
That was no surprise. The nation noticed the dispute when Tech suddenly had a 20-game football schedule as both conferences included Sonny Cumbie’s team on the composite 2026 slates released as basketball season faded out.
But CUSA will surely receive some seven-figure compensation for grudgingly parting ways with the Bulldogs. How stiff is that tab? We will probably never know. It’s probably being covered by private money and so will evade public records requests.
All we know is that trips to Monroe, Lafayette, Hattiesburg, Jonesboro (Ark.), even Troy (Ala.) or Mobile, are not remotely as arduous or expensive as going to Atlanta, Miami, Lynchburg (Va., not Tenn. – Jerry Falwell in Virginia, Jack Daniels in Tennessee) or Delaware, a state with only five counties, a place where it takes less time to visit than to get there from Ruston.
The Sun Belt shift is smart. We’ll see in the next 5-10 years how the landscape of college sports quakes – thanks to the evolution of NIL and TV money, it’s going to look a lot like it did 50 years ago, when the big schools were in the University Division and the rest were College Division. The monied schools will not want to share the wealth; they’ll still allow access to the Tech, ULM, Grambling and Northwestern States of the world, because they’d be stupid to cannibalize themselves.
While scribing about patience, a much-deserved shoutout goes to the girls and coaches and fans of the Huntington and Southwood softball teams. It took some patience, endurance actually, over five hours, 40 minutes, to finish their epic battle last Thursday night.
Softball extra inning games can last a long time if the international tie breaker rule isn’t used. In 1991, then USL, then nationally-ranked USL, and a good Northwestern State team locked in a still state-college record 21-inning staredown that took over four hours for the Cajuns to prevail 2-1.
Southwood 54 (or was it 55?), Huntington 45 did not go extras. But it went on and on and on. Neither team is going to the playoffs. But they battled as if this was a championship game.
It’s a nice reminder that while playoffs are exciting, they’re not the end-all, be-all for high school sports.
It’s about the quality of the effort, the memories made, the lessons learned. Winning is great – nobody does it better in softball than Tiffany Wood’s Calvary softball team, 32-1 and aiming for a sixth straight state title – and those girls are having a fabulous experience far past the foul poles.
But those Lady Raiders and Lady Cowboys, and the other teams that only hear about postseason, get to make memories, a few we occasionally read about, but more they’ll carry forward for many years.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com
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