This has been a busy stretch for Warren County sports. All four high schools have played, or are about to play, baseball and softball playoff series this week. High school track and tennis teams have competed in their district and state tournaments here in town over the past two weeks.

It’s a sports smorgasbord that’s had us running between hither and yon to cover it all, which hasn’t left a lot of time to crank out a weekly column — which means it’s time to once again mail it in by cranking out about 400 words on what’s in my brain at the moment.

Welcome to another round of random thoughts. We’ll try to do better next week:

• Speaking of “hither and yon,” has anyone ever stopped to ask, exactly, where Hither and Yon are? Is Hither up near Redwood and Yon a suburb of Yokena? I feel certain they’ll both pop up on the TV map the next time there’s a tornado warning.

• We’ve been blessed the past three college baseball seasons, with local favorites Mississippi State, Ole Miss and LSU all winning national titles and Southern Miss making a couple of deep postseason runs. This May and June are looking bleak, though.

LSU stinks. Ole Miss and State, and maybe even USM will need to put in some work just to reach the NCAA Tournament. Get it together, guys. Do you know how hard it is to fill a sports section in late May without you?

• The high school track and field postseason is in round two of three this weekend, and it looks like Warren County has an excellent chance to extend its 32-year streak of individual state champions.

Vicksburg’s Tyler Henderson is the defending state champion in the boys’ triple jump. His teammate Koury Vample is undefeated this season in the 300 meter hurdles. The Missy Gators’ Rodrianna Hall (long jump) and Shaniyah Walker (400 meters), Warren Central’s Adria Burrell (100 and 200 meters) and St. Aloysius’ Samantha Edwards (3,200 meters) will also contend for titles.

Here’s hoping they make it 33 years of Warren County champions.

• About a month ago, I started swimming again to get back into shape. During past efforts I’ve gotten some weird ailments ranging from itchy skin (too much chlorine) to aching feet (from the stress of pushing off the wall). This time it’s sneezing fits.

It feels like water is lingering in my nose after a workout, and it’s making me sneezy and snotty for the rest of the night. My wife says it’s because I think I’m Aquaman and I need to stop breathing in the water.

That’s a joke, of course.

I pretend I’m Namor.

Not Aquaman. Never Aquaman.

• Year two of our Athlete of the Week contest has been a success, which means it’ll come back for year three. After removing the hourly restriction and allowing unlimited votes, the total number of votes each week has jumped from the hundreds to the thousands. Thank you to all of our readers for your support and participation.

With the high school sports year winding down, we’ll wrap up the 2023-24 contest in a couple of weeks. Maybe we’ll even have one last blowout with an Athlete of the Year grand finale.

• Most of my sports emails come when I mess something up, but if y’all have any random sports questions send them my way at sports@vicksburgpost.com with “Sports Mailbag” in the subject line. I’ll try to answer them and, if there’s enough of them, run some in a future column.

And if you think I’m just trolling for material for another column, you’re right. It’s not easy coming up with profound insights every week, even if a few occasionally pop into my brain.

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Ernest Bowker is the sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com