Podcasts about South Dakota, United States

The two college sports shows on this page spend their best clips on the same neighbour. A wrestling episode of The Jackrabbit Illustrated Podcast carries the boast of having “never lost to an NDSU wrestler”; on MonDak Football Show the hosts convene a Friday-night recording because news is breaking that North Dakota State has an invitation to the Mountain West. The listening here is sports first — SDSU, USD, FCS playoff math, Stampede hockey — with the rivalry across the state line as its running pressure. Around that sit interview shows in which the state describes itself: a woman recalling how, at 30, she was asked to be secretary of health; a rancher hosting legislators; a conservation staffer on making soil health approachable. State politics arrives sideways, through those guests, rather than as a beat of its own.

What South Dakota is

South Dakota is a northern Great Plains state of roughly 900,000 people, split by the Missouri River into the farm country of East River and the ranch country of West River. Sioux Falls, in the southeast, is the largest city; Pierre is the capital. The Black Hills, the Badlands and Mount Rushmore are in the west, and pheasant hunting and walleye fishing are close to civic institutions.

Jacks, Yotes and the NDSU question

Wrestling, not football, is what The Jackrabbit Illustrated Podcast's recent titles circle: a run of episodes under The Takedown banner with coaches as guests, "2026 Wrestling March MATness NCAA Tournament discussion", a recruiting special with Coach Dan Jackson. It sounds like a roundtable that interrupts itself and circles back, and the Clay Carlson clip is straight coaching talk: a wrestler who holds on and won't push the pace gets stung and loses four to two, so the offseason job is to be offensive; a 133-pound bracket whose three entrants were all SDSU athletes, so teammates wrestled each other. In the Cam Simaz episode the coach grants that the Minnesota win mattered in November but says "nobody really cares until March".

MonDak Football Show works the same conference as a duo, one throwing out a claim and the other testing it, across the FCS programs of the Dakotas and Montana. The realignment clip is the one to hear: NDSU has an invite to the Mountain West and is working on the financials, earlier the same day the pair had discussed South Dakota's Travis Johansson leaving. Elsewhere Sam says "the answer is money" before asking what college football is actually solving, and the USD clip is plainer: South Dakota is replacing its starting quarterback and all three options are unproven. Recent titles keep returning to the people who call the games — John Thayer for the Coyotes, Tyler Merriam for the Jackrabbits.

What Sioux Falls adds

A good share of the listening on this page comes from Sioux Falls, which supplies the everyday sports radio and the local history. Calling All Sports is interview radio with a long memory; its titles name a Stampede hockey head coach, a DWU volleyball coach, a Brandon Valley football coach, and its clips run wider — the Kris Atteberry episode on what the Twins did to Garrett Crochet, eleven runs in one and two-thirds innings, called one of the most shocking things the speaker has ever seen in baseball; Jim Olander describing the Stampede bench erupting for Ethan Sung. Happy Hour with John Gaskins is looser, with beer, weather and studio asides before the subject. Its clips all come from "Sports Movie Mount Rushmores according to John & Cordell", where Gaskins names Major League his “George Washington, the first” of sports movies, while the titles carry the state's football business: USD A.D. Jon Schemmel on FBS feasibility and DakotaDome plans, Jimmy Rogers at Iowa State, high school football across the state.

Local Lou is the history, a Sioux Falls local reading historical markers and looking into them. Its clips are about the State Theatre, dark for nearly 30 years and reopened on December 11, 2020: a building saved by a new roof in the early 2000s and then by the slower work of getting it back into people's memories. Derek Burink was first through the doors for the reopening screening of White Christmas. Readers who want more of this can go to the Sioux Falls page.

The capital, through its guests

South Dakota Hall of Fame Legacy Podcast interviews inductees, and its clips are civic memory in the first person. Kitty Kinsman recalls coming to Pierre — known, she says, for government jobs — landing as assistant to the secretary of health, and at 30 deciding she had nothing to lose by putting her name in when her predecessor left; the governor called her to his office and gave her the job. Robert Arnio's clip is heavier: an adolescent suicide cluster in South Dakota that forced him to challenge the idea that discussing suicide causes it. Recent titles lean toward healthcare — John Porter, Dr. Frank Alvine, Dr. Sophie Two Hawk.

The Heart of Rural America is where the legislature shows up. Amanda Radke's show is ranch-family agriculture with a strong point of view, brisk and willing to swell into moral language, and its titles keep returning to property fights and Pierre: "100 Years on the Range, Then the State Came Knocking: Casey Murph's Fight for His Family's Ranch", "Senator Mike Rounds on Trump's Imported Beef Announcement", and a replay with the Speaker of the House, the Speaker Pro Tem and Senator Mark Lapka, in which Lapka describes a first year in Pierre when farmers in blue jeans were told they were breaking decorum. The Courtney Coughlin clips are the other half — bet on yourself, turn a flower patch into a family business — with talk of kids who already want to be auctioneers and sell bulls.

The Best Job in South Dakota is gentler, a two-host interview program with a ritual of telling each guest they hold the best job in the state. Katie Yuthi's clip explains the Dakota Conservation Network as "the starting point for conservation" and describes her work at the South Dakota association of conservation districts as translation rather than expertise: how information is organized, whether people can find it, whether it moves them to the next step. BNI Heartland's Regional Podcast, a referral-networking show for Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota and western Iowa, is the one business show here not about the land; its clips are a story about Tim Roberts mapping out five one-to-one lunches a week, and Vince Vigneri arguing that attendance means listening, not just showing up.

Outdoors and the garden

South Dakota GFP Podcast is Game, Fish and Parks talking about its own work, with the standing caveat that guests' opinions aren't necessarily the agency's. Chris Hall and Nick Harrington trade recent fishing trips, Harrington says where to find plenty of walleyes and good eaters in the Stillen Basin, and Hall lays out the Hunt for Habitat raffle with elk, deer and antelope tags. Titles cover turkey hunting, a fisheries roundtable, snow geese, Black Hills ice fishing and mountain lion sightings, zebra mussels in Sharpe and Francis Case.

Growing Together: A Gardening Podcast is upper Midwest rather than South Dakota alone — Don Kinzler and John Lamb on gardening across the Dakotas, Minnesota, eastern Montana and southern Manitoba, unhurried and kitchen-table, working from listener questions. Its clips are the detours the show permits: the Irish potato famine as a late-blight story, and why poor people under English landowners came to depend on a crop that yields a lot from a small area and stores well; a basswood with a ten-foot trunk circumference that looked healthy and was hollow; meteorologist Jesse Ritka on a record summer of more than 75 tornadoes in North Dakota.

Where to start

• For the rivalry and the realignment story: MonDak Football Show's "Bonus Bonus BONUS Pod - NDSU To FBS Is Nearing Reality", then The Jackrabbit Illustrated Podcast's Clay Carlson episode for the wrestling room.
• For the state in its own words: South Dakota Hall of Fame Legacy Podcast with Kitty Kinsman, then The Heart of Rural America's replay with the legislators.
• For the outdoors: South Dakota GFP Podcast's fishing question-and-answer clips.
• For Sioux Falls: Local Lou on the State Theatre and Calling All Sports on the Stampede.

The South Dakota feed on this page plays clips from these shows.