“What the heck are we going to talk about for 10 hours a week?”
That is what Mike Henriksen thought to himself when he was hired by KWSN Sports Radio program director Craig Mattick to co-host “Sports Talk with Craig & Mike” back in 2001.
KWSN had spent about a year as South Dakota’s first 24-hour all-sports radio station, which carried national sports talk shows and play-by-play of Sioux Falls Canaries baseball, University of Sioux Falls football and basketball, plus local high school events.
Mattick, who called those prep games and had previously hosted KWSN’s award-winning morning show on what had been a news talk station, decided to launch a two-hour local sports show from 3 to 5 p.m., Monday thru Friday.
Henriksen had been a popular sportscaster in the state for 20 years, and spent 13 of them co-hosting a highly-rated morning show on KELO-AM in Sioux Falls, a music station until the parent company decided to turn it into a news talker while KWSN flipped to all-sports. In fact, Henriksen and Mattick had been morning show competitors off-and-on for a dozen years.
But the two men were of similar age and small town Upper Midwestern roots — both in their early fourties, Mattick from Keister, Minnesota, and Henriksen from Hampton, Nebraska. They were already familiar with each other and would soon be partners calling statewide high school state championship football and basketball together (which they still do for hoops).
Their chemistry not a concern, Mattick and Henriksen were slightly uncertain how to handle unchartered territory of local sports talk.
But they knew this: South Dakota’s largest city was already starting to boom in population, economy, and thirst for sports — with three minor league teams, Augustana competing in the same Div. II league with rivals South Dakota and South Dakota State, and a golden age of high school athletics that included mostly-packed houses at Howard Wood Field for football and a Roosevelt girls basketball team touring the nation in the midst of a record 111-game winning streak.
On April 3, 2001, it was time for lift-off of “Sports Talk with Craig and Mike.” It lasted five years until Henriksen left to take over a weekly sports interview show called “Sportsmax,” which he continues today as “The South Dakota Sports History Show” on 20 stations statewide, including KWSN.
But “Sports Talk” moved on with Mattick and three subsequent co-hosts — The late Bob Laskowski (2006-08), John Gaskins (2008-11), Chris Tubbs (2011-16), and Gaskins again (2016-present).
By 2010, Sioux Falls had four minor league teams (who had won a collective eight championships) and had become the host city for a Div. I college basketball conference tournament (SDSU and USD moved up to Div. I). USF had moved from NAIA (where they won three national titles in football from 2006-09) to become a literal neighborhood rival with Augie in Div. II.
Indeed, there was something to talk about, and with a growing national wave of sports talk popularity and multiple local daily sports talk shows having popped up all over the Rushmore State, “Sports Talk” expanded to three hours daily.
Ten years later, 10 hours a week still isn’t enough.
Not with a new, state-of-the-art, 12,000-seat arena that hosts the Summit League men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, the Jackrabbits and Coyotes having won 16 of those events combined to become almost annual regulars in the NCAA Tournament, the Vikings having built a plush new football stadium and captured four Div. II national titles in other sports, the Jacks the Cougars becoming regulars in the Top 25 football polls, and the four minor league teams combining for 17 league titles in the 31 years since basketball’s Skyforce became the first professional team of modern sports in the city. Oh, and prep sports remains as near and dear to South Dakotans as they ever have, and perhaps more than most states across the country.
While the focus of the show has expanded to lively debates about the hottest national topics and the region’s most popular major pro and college teams (Vikings, Packers, Broncos, Chiefs, Twins, Timberwolves, Wild, Gophers, Hawkeyes, Cyclones and Huskers), it still makes the South Dakota teams and issues a key component of content — especially in a new age where Augustana is about to join USD and SDSU in Div. I and the Champions Tour has brought a bevy of popular major championship golfers to the Sanford International, which drew over 70,000 spectators last autumn.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
The question now isn’t “What are we going to talk about for 10 hours a week” in Sioux Falls, but how do we cram it all in to 15 hours a week, now weekdays from 3 to 6 p.m.?
The last three weeks have brought less to cram, with sports and life on lockdown during the coronavirus crisis. But it gives hosts of “Sports Talk” past and present a chance to pause and look back.
On the 19th anniversary of the show’s debut, Henriksen — who for the last decade has co-hosted statewide hour-long sports show “Calling All Sports” with veteran Sioux Falls TV sportscaster Mark Ovenden as the lead-in to “Sports Talk” — joined Mattick and Gaskins on Friday to drive down memory lane and reminisce about the early days.
This included an uncomfortable interview with a Pro Football Hall of Famer who stunned “Craig and Mike” with his bombastic self-absorption and the first (and most frequent) guest, local sportswriter (now at-large columnist) Stu Whitney, who also joined Friday’s program to harken his debut of what became a littany of controversial appearances which occasionally ruffled feathers with both power brokers and Average Joe fans of South Dakota sports.
To hear the full interview with Henriksen, click here.
To hear the full interview with Whitney, click here.
