Today's Sports

Going into the first week of any season, every team has questions, whether it has returned every starter from the year before or hasn’t returned any. Every team has doubts heading into their first game and no team has any guarantees.This Friday, the Vandals will get answers to a lot of the questions that have been swarming around in their minds the past few weeks.

Vandalia will be traveling to play EA-Wood River on Friday. The Oilers are coming off a 2-7 season. Their only two wins came against Pana, whhich finished the season 0-9, and Gillespie, which was 3-6 overall.

Tuesday night’s meeting of the Field of Dreams Committee was meant to update the community on the status of the project to revitalize area baseball and softball fields. The hour-and-forty-minute round table may have brought up more questions than it answered and revealed how much work the committee still has to do in order to see their “field of dreams” come to life.

The second meeting of the committee brought new faces and a slew of questions, concerns and ideas.

As the Vandalia football team takes the field this week to start practice, the Vandals are not only battling each other in the trenches and on the depth chart, but they are also fighting off heat illness. For head coach John Stout, heat illness is the “No. 1 concern.”

Heat illness can be as minor as a heat rash, when sweat ducts on the skin are covered and the covered area itches, to as severe as heatstroke, when the body fails to regulate its own temperature. Heatstroke is a medical emergency that can be fatal.

Losing is never easy.

For the Guaranteed Air Freight Fast Pitch Softball team, losing in the ASA State Championship game to the Decatur Pride is just heartbreaking.

After a weekend of five games, two rain delays, a fog delay and a 10-inning championship game, second place wasn’t enough to buoy The Freight's spirits.

The narrow loss against The Pride is Vandalia's third straight loss to Decatur, after Vandalia started the season 2-0 against The Pride.