MITCHELL — Weekday nights at the Cadwell Sports Complex can get hectic during the spring and summer.

Between adult leagues, and baseball and softball practices or games at the youth levels, the 13 diamonds are all put to use, and people of all ages are scurrying about, bats on shoulders, gloves in hand.

This year, it’s been busier than ever, largely due to the growth of fast-pitch softball in Mitchell.

“Last year, there weren’t fields that were being used every day,” said Alyson Palmer, founder of the Storm softball club. “So we were like ‘oh, okay, well, if we need to have extra practice, we can go here.’

“This year, every field and every time slot was taken up when we had the field meeting.”

The growth of the sport comes at an ideal time, as softball became an SDHSAA sanctioned sport in 2023. Since then, 59 schools in the state have fielded a team.

Augustana head softball coach Gretta Melsted is a stalwart of the sport in South Dakota, having been the Vikings’ coach for 18 years, guiding the team to 11 Division II NCAA Tournaments and winning the 2019 national championship.

She’s heavily recruited the state, and has relationships with all the prominent club coaches. In fact, her assistant coach, Kelsey Thompson, runs the South Dakota Renegades softball club in Sioux Falls — one of the top clubs in the state.

While Melsted believes the addition of sanctioned softball is good for the state, she isn’t sure if its impact on the sport’s overall popularity is quantifiable yet.

“I still think it’s a little too early to tell,” Melsted said. “Because it’s only been one year. But you will see that growth and you will see that excitement for the sport now that high schools are giving young girls that opportunity. And it’s only going to make softball better in this state. We have a lot of good club teams. And that’s been what’s carried us so far. But adding high school softball makes it much more legitimate in the state.”

What is quantifiable is the number of schools playing softball. In the first year of sanctioned softball in 2023, there were 47 schools participating. That number grew by 12 schools in 2024.

Sanctioned softball has also dispelled an early concern that schools would fail to collaborate with club teams, resulting in the state’s top talent not playing for the school teams during the spring.

“From people that I’ve talked to, they said (the transition) has been pretty seamless,” Mitchell softball coach Kent Van Overschelde said. “A large majority of the girls have jumped on board with their high school teams, and I think that’s evident, especially with the top teams in the program.”

And at least one college coach in the state is in support of kids playing for their school teams in the spring.

“I love seeing kids play for their high school on top of playing club ball because there’s just something special about being able to represent the school that you go to,” Melsted said.

Van Overschelde estimated just 40 percent of the girls on the Kernels’ softball team grew up playing the sport consistently, many from the league that’s run by parks and recreation.

But with the development of more youth clubs in the area, that number may grow in the coming years.

Three years ago, Palmer realized it was difficult for many families to get their kids to the city’s youth softball summer league run by the rec center, because practices were early in the morning.

So she got together with some other parents and formed a private league that would hold practices in the evening. It was immediately popular.

“Our first year we got a hold of a few parents and we thought we’d have like 30 sign up. We had 62 sign up,” Palmer said.

This season, in year three, there are 82 girls in the club, with teams in the under-4 to under-12 divisions.

Last year, some of the older girls scrimmaged the other youth softball team in town, the Sparklers, as well as teams from Letcher, Mount Vernon and Alexandria.

However, the Storm’s main focus isn’t to bounce around from city to city playing games, but instead to become a local entity that teaches girls the fundamentals of the sport and becomes a permanent league.

“I think it’s grown a lot and we’re trying to keep it to not be such a traveling league,” Palmer said. “Our goal is to get enough girls that we can actually have a Mitchell league, like you’re going to have four to six U10 teams and have games every week.”

As a teacher at Mitchell, Palmer knows several of the girls on the Kernels’ varsity team, and is working to connect them with the younger players. These are the types of connectiions that could further bolster the high school team down the line. Several of the players have agreed to come help at practices this summer.

The next step would be building a softball training facility in Mitchell. As things stand, there aren’t any notable in-state facilities outside of Sioux Falls or Rapid City. At least one of Mitchell’s top players, Macey Linke, travels to Tea to train at The Playground, an indoor softball facility run by Tea Area coach Emmie Uitts.

According to Melsted, those types of facilities come after communities build a strong base of youth players.

“I think what you’ll see is the more that kids play softball, the more you’re going to see that happen,” she said.

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Science, the Legend-200, dark matter, and more science.

Tuesday, South Dakota Mines hosted the 5th Annual Conference on Science at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Lectures on science echoed throughout the halls of the Classroom Building at the School of Mines campus.

A mix of undergraduate and graduate students were in attendance to learn about the variety of research and experiments that take place at the SURF underground facility.

“This conference very unique because they bring different researchers from different fields. We don’t always have this kind of conference in other places,” says Mines Physics Assistant Professor Dr. Jingbo Wang.

He added the National Science Foundation awards a conference grant to support young researchers at Mines. Wang says the conference provides students a chance for their work to get noticed.

“They can get in touch in-person with the most interesting, the most compelling researchers in the field. And they have the opportunity to present their own work and make themselves exposed to the wider community,” says Wang.

During lectures, attendees learned about the Legend-200 experiment created by Mines students and faculty.

“That’s an outgrowth of the Majorana demonstrator technology. They needed the world’s purest copper to in order to reduce the backgrounds to see the possibility of seeing a rare nuclear decay,” says SURF Science Director Jaret Heise.

A questions and answers session took place after lectures to provide students a chance to better their understanding of recent progress in underground physics and other fields.

Wang says the conference is a beneficial experience for everyone involved.

“I can see the most advanced developments of the field, and for our students, they can apply the knowledge that they learn from our graduate or end of graduate programming to those presentations,” says Wang.

The Conference on Science at SURF will run through Thursday.

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Gov. Kristi Noem appointed a former Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety chief to a post in the state’s Department of Tribal Relations on Tuesday, alleging he “found himself without a job” for speaking up about drug cartels on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The appointment of Algin Young as tribal law enforcement liaison came as another tribe voted to ban the governor from its lands, and as questions arose about the impact of a ban voted on by another South Dakota tribe.

Sixth tribal nation bans Noem for comments on cartels, Native children

The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe voted to ban Noem from its lands Tuesday morning, Chairman Peter Lengkeek told South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Business and Claims Committee, the highest-level elected body for that nation, voted to support a ban last week, though it’s since been pointed out that such a ban would not be final and enforceable without a vote of tribal members. The tribes were the sixth and seventh of the nine tribes in the state to vote in favor of banning the governor so far this year.

The recent spate of conflicts with the state’s tribes began on Jan. 31, when the governor delivered a speech on U.S. border policy to a joint session of the South Dakota Legislature. In it, she described the southern border of the U.S. as a “warzone,” language she repeated in her Tuesday press release on Young’s appointment. 

Her speech included language calling out the impact of Mexican drug cartels on the reservations. 

Noem has suggested that responses from tribal leaders to her cartel comments, as well as the bans, have come because some of them are “personally benefiting” from a cartel presence on reservations.

She’s also drawn fire for telling audiences in Winner and Mitchell that Native children lack hope, and that “they don’t have parents who show up and help them.”

Young appointment implies firing 

Noem has argued that the federal government is failing tribes through a lack of law enforcement funding. The Oglala Sioux Tribe has sued the federal government over that issue, and Noem pledged to support that lawsuit during her Jan. 31 speech.

The governor’s office has not intervened as a party in the tribe’s most recent federal lawsuit, but she has moved to support tribal law enforcement in other ways. Last month, she pledged to fund a special session of the state’s police academy specifically for tribal trainees. Most tribal police train for 13 weeks in New Mexico, and South Dakota’s congressional delegation has lobbied for a regional training facility to encourage recruitment. 

In February, Noem penned a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs urging more funding for tribal law enforcement in South Dakota.

In Noem’s press release on his appointment, Young said that he looks forward “to serving as an ambassador for the State of South Dakota at the federal level and with the State’s nine tribal nations to facilitate solutions for tribal law enforcement and understand and navigate jurisdictional challenges.”

The release also includes a thinly veiled reference to tribal resistance to Noem’s comments. 

The release says that Young “found himself without a job” after “bravely testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the cartel presence on tribal lands.”

Noem slings accusations about tribes while signing education bills

Young testified before that committee during a listening session about public safety in Indian Country on March 20. His testimony came minutes after the testimony of Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out. 

Neither mentioned cartels in their verbal comments, which can be viewed in full on the committee’s website. 

The Senate committee did collect written testimony until April 12, and that testimony is not available online. There was no immediate response Tuesday to an email to the committee’s press officers asking for any written testimony that may have been submitted by Young or Star Comes Out.

The tribe’s director of public safety job was advertised on the tribe’s Facebook page on April 15. There were no Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearings between March 20 and that date. 

Indian Country Today reported that Young’s contract expired on April 20.

Star Comes Out did not return a Searchlight message seeking comment on Young’s appointment.

Representatives with Noem’s office and the Office of Tribal Relations did not offer a date for the “cartel presence” testimony.

Yankton Sioux Tribe ban vote not binding

So far, seven tribes have voted to ban Noem from their lands. The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe have yet to pass such a resolution. Lower Brule voted down such a ban earlier this year, but Chairman Clyde Estes told SDPB that it might consider one again in June based on Noem’s comments about Native children.

Noem to lawmakers: Be ready to take action on southern border ‘invasion’

“The children should be left out of any political discussion,” Estes told SDPB’s Lee Strubinger. “To say that they have no hope is wrong and she should not have said that.”

The Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Business and Claims Committee voted to support a ban that would bar the governor from its lands on Friday, but that vote lacks the authority of law, the committee’s secretary said Tuesday. 

Such a ban would not be official without a vote from the tribe’s general council, meaning a vote of tribal members at a meeting called by either the committee leadership or a petition from tribal members.

“We don’t have anything scheduled,” said Secretary Courtney Sully. “We don’t even have a resolution.”

The Yankton Sioux Tribe is the only one of the nine tribes in South Dakota that lacks a tribal council-style government with elected representatives to vote on all tribal affairs. Such governments are known as “IRA” governments, named for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged tribal nations to adopt city council-style authority structures.

The Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Business and Claims Committee, Sully said, aligns more closely with pre-colonial decision-making. The committee is empowered to manage the tribe’s day-to-day affairs, Sully said, but cannot take larger actions without a vote of the people. 

“Banning someone isn’t part of our daily business,” said Sully, who said she abstained from the Friday vote. She doesn’t like the governor’s comments, she said, but doesn’t believe they rise to the level of something requiring a ban. 

The majority of the committee did vote to endorse a ban, however. A statement from Vice Chair Jason Cooke, sent to Searchlight on Tuesday, reiterated the earlier words of committee member Ryan Cournoyer, who said the vote was a sign of solidarity with other tribes.

The statement calls the governor “anti-tribe.” It references pre-2024 conflicts over pipeline protests, COVID checkpoints, education, and Noem’s lack of response to discrimination against Native Americans by a Rapid City hotel owner. The statement says the governor “now blames tribes for crime in her own cities.”

“Governor Noem, stop the political pandering and get serious about working on these issues with Tribes,” Cooke wrote. “It has been six years of inaction, ineptness, and ignorance from your office on serious policy issues impacting our shared citizens.”