He covered South Dakota State coaching legends John Stiegelmeier and Scott Nagy during both trying and triumphant times, and Aaron Johnston through a seemingly smooth ride to instant big-time success (partially interrupted by AJ's fleeting turbulence of leaving SDSU for another job only to change his mind).

He witnessed and wrote about thrilling games and historic moments like the first Summit League Tournament in Sioux Falls and NCAA March Madness games from Detroit to Lubbock to "The Pit" in New Mexico.

He traveled coast-to-coast — from Southern California to New York City and random Midwestern college hamlets like Macomb and Terre Haute in between — to document with wide-eyed curiosity the adventures in the new Division I frontier of SDSU sports.

Through it all, Terry Vandrovec delivered to Jackrabbit fans the stories that marked a wild, at-times wonderful and at-times weird transition from the old and glorious Div. II North Central Conference era that made complete sense, to the bizarre dues-paying and later glamorous payoff of modern mid-major Div. I life.

New Jersey Tech and IUPUI and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, oh my. Court stormings at Sioux Falls Arena and the PREMIER Center and jealous Summit League opponents. FCS playoffs and scaring the daylights out of Nebraska and scraping and clawing to take down the Bison beast.

Zenner and Vogel and Wolters.

Vandrovec looks back on his dynamic decade at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, which followed a decade covering a wide variety of sports in his home state of North Dakota.

But he starts with a look back of this past decade, when he decided to "drop out" of the media game for a family-friendlier gig with Sanford Health that still allows him to be part of the most exciting sports action in the state.