By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

DES MOINES, Iowa, July 11, 2026 — In this week of my 79th birthday (July 11), the Carroll Times Herald, one of the nine newspapers I subscribe to, has been running an ad saying it “has an opening for a full-time sportswriter/photographer….

“A love for high school sports is a must for success in this position,” the ad says. “Not sure that you have what it takes to do the job? Just give us a call. We have the resources and tools to train the right person.”

My immediate reaction was ridiculous, but real.

I felt like I was in the bullpen, getting a call to warm-up, you know?

The ad in the Carroll Times Herald.

Carroll! The town of 10,300 in west central Iowa has long been one of the best high school sports towns in the state. And it’ll be getting even better now with Carroll High School joining cross-town, arch-rival Carroll Kuemper Catholic High School in the Hawkeye Ten Conference.

They need a sportswriter!

Holy Denny O’Grady!

O’Grady, I probably should explain to a few of you, is the late sportswriting legend who, in 30 years at the Carroll newspaper, consistently produced one of the best sports sections in the whole state. He died from cancer in December, 2024. He spent his last 20 years in Des Moines helping take care of his mother, as her health slipped, and serving as the public address announcer for sports events at his high school alma mater, Dowling Catholic.

And now the O’Grady desk is opening up at the Times Herald in Carroll.

Oh! If I could peel off 50 of my years — let’s see — that would make me 29. Wait. Let’s go with this: If I could peel off 55 of my years, making me 24 and single. Then I might be the perfect candidate.

After all, I do know sportswriting; I started doing it when I was 13. I know the Wilson & Burns family that ran the Carroll paper for 93 years, always providing great coverage of the local sports scene. I know and have worked with the current owners, the Iowa Information Media Group, headed by the Wagners of Sheldon in northwest Iowa.

Wow, I wondered, should I call Central General Manager Steve Fisher at the Times Herald in Carroll and inquire about the job?

What would he think?

What probably would pop up first in Steve’s mind, I knew, would be the old proverb, “There’s no fool like an old fool!”

I called him anyway.

“We’ve had a couple of inquiries, and we’ve got an interview scheduled next Friday,” Fisher said Friday afternoon, “but it’s kind of hard filling these positions now, especially with someone who will want to stay for at least a few years.”

Barry Poe, a veteran sportswriter who works for Iowa Information Media and bases in Sioux City, has been handling the Carroll sports reporting remotely and on a temporary basis. But the Wagners need him at some of their other newspaper properties, too.

My pal Doug Burns, who was the last news chief of the Times Herald during the Wilson family ownership, told me Friday night that “you shouldn’t romanticize that job” because the newspaper business has changed so much since the O’Grady years. The Carroll paper was the “Daily Times Herald,” printing five days a week, for most of its run. It dropped back to twice-per-week editions when the COVID and the economy began killing papers across Iowa and beyond. There’s lots of digital challenges and opportunities, too.

But I’ve been “romanticizing” sportswriting all my life, I told Burns. I’m probably not going to stop doing that now.

The legendary Carroll sports editor Denny O’Grady. (Photo from Doug Burns)

Then the two of us started doing exactly that in our phone chat. He recalled all the years when he, DTH Executive Editor Larry Devine, outstanding photographer Jeff Storjohann and other Carroll newspaper employees would be running all over the area on game nights — adding stories and photos to O’Grady’s multi-page sports sections. Burns recalled covering championship caliber teams from Southern Cal (the former high school in the south part of Calhoun County, not the university in California), IKM, Lake View-Auburn, Glidden-Ralston, Coon Rapids-Bayard and others.

“We worked really hard at building that coverage,” Burns said. “In fact, you could make an argument that the most important figure in Carroll’s economic development success the last 50 years was not my hero Art Neu, not C.J. Niles who headed economic development for the whole state, and not me — but that it was really Denny O’Grady. He was so well-read in all those other outlying communities that he was a main reason people from all those towns became loyal shoppers at businesses in Carroll. His work solidified our city’s status as a regional hub.”

He also confirmed in print Carroll’s status as one of the best high school sports towns in the state.

I started recalling the athletes who made it so.

“The road to a state championship goes through Carroll,” Carroll High basketball great Sara Stribe now-Vander Sanden told me in an interview back in the 1990s. She was talking girls basketball there, but the same thing applies to almost all sports.

Oh, think of so many of the others from Carroll — Rollie Kitt, Dave Staiert, the Haluska brothers (Adam, Sean and Blake), Shellie Mosman now-Haluska, Brian David, Nick Nurse, all the Pettit kids, Michael Barta, Casey Kasperbauer, D.J. Vonnahme. So many more I’m forgetting, of course.

And a whole lot of other sportswriters helped build the Times Herald tradition — Dale Barton in the early years before he went to the Omaha World-Herald; Ashley Schable, now the director of the Carroll Chamber of Commerce; Chris Cuellar, now information director for the Iowa High School Athletic Association; Brett Christie, an intern who went on to the Chicago Tribune sports department; Brandon Hurley, now the editor of both the Ames Tribune and the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and Mark Schafer, whom I believe is now covering teams in southeast Iowa.

There just has to be a 24-year-old me out there, ready to roll with this Carroll sportswriting job. As I understand it, the position will also include covering the sports scene in Jefferson, another of my homes.

I’ll just dream about it, leave the actual work to the younger newsies, and happily hang out more with my wife Mary Riche, who’s made me “the luckiest SOB in Iowa,” as I’ve written. And I’ll continue to be a subscriber.

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