The Show for Aug. 18, 2026: Tohono O'odam fight border wall, Big 12 sponsorship and more

The Tohono O’odam tribe is trying to stop the Trump administration from building a wall through its land. Now a judge says they can’t stop it. Plus, how a unique sponsorship could affect the Big 12 Conference this year.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest non-profit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, non-profit for Arizona.bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforAZ.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, new research shows with more heatwaves, we’ll also be seeing more wildfires.

LAUREN GILGER: And the Big 12 Conference has entered into a new sponsorship deal, what it could mean for schools like ASU and U of A.

MARK BRODIE: But first, this spring, lots of politicos were focused on a race that didn’t often attract much focus: the SRP board. That’s because Turning Point was supporting a slate of candidates running against a so-called clean energy team. The clean energy candidates won a majority, but that is not, as it turns out, the end of the story. With more now to explain is KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez from the politics desk. Good morning, Camryn.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So, why are we still talking about this?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: We’re still talking about this because the clean energy team did narrowly win that majority and then they just recently lost it because one of their guys decided to retire.

MARK BRODIE: And who is this person, and do we have a sense of why he decided to retire?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, his name is Nick Brown and he’d been on the board for a while, but he told the Republic it’s time for him to spend time with his family. So he quit shortly after winning reelection and subsequently, they replaced him with someone who is not on the clean energy team, which means they don’t have a majority of 8-6. Now, it’s a 7-7 split.

MARK BRODIE: All right, so let’s talk about the replacement. This is somebody well-known to people in political circles, somebody who has another elected position.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It is. It’s the big name, Tom Galvin. And he’s on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and he’s going to keep that seat and do both of these jobs at the same time. He told me he doesn’t plan to retire. Galvin is a Republican. He’s not in the Turning Point group. In fact, he’s a bit of an enemy of Turning Point USA. But he’s also certainly not in the clean energy team, so he’s one of these miscellaneous people.

MARK BRODIE: And the people who are left on the board, are they — they’re not all Turning Point folks, right?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Correct. So, of those seven folks who are not on the clean energy team, there’s a couple of them who are Turning Point-backed or endorsed candidates, and then there’s a few other folks who are just, you know, there.

MARK BRODIE: Kind of like Tom Galvin, who’s not Turning Point, not clean energy, somewhere in the middle.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I suppose so, yeah. SRP operates strangely because they’ve got this big 30-member council and then they’ve got this smaller 14-member board, and then the president and vice president is separate, and then from them they’ve got these other, you know, groups that govern separately energy and water.

MARK BRODIE: OK. Why was Tom Galvin appointed to fill this spot? Is that the way that these things typically happen?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yes and no. So, there is a bit of a precedent that if someone steps down from the board, that someone from the council who’s in their area, if they’re interested in stepping up, ascending to that seat, would basically have the option to do that.

MARK BRODIE: From the 30 — the larger council, to move up to the smaller board.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Right. And so, them going outside of the council and picking Galvin, who hadn’t been sitting on the council, was something that the clean energy folks are not happy about and they said was unusual. And I talked to Ken Clark, who’s on the clean energy team and is part of the council, and he said it felt engineered to him because there was a guy, Eric Goetsenberger, who did want that seat and did want to ascend and take Nick Brown’s place, and that would have kept their majority, but they bypassed that to go for Galvin instead.

MARK BRODIE: Do we know why that happened?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Well, I mean, the board, the full council got to vote on this and it was a narrow vote for Galvin, so I would suspect it’s because the non-clean energy folks didn’t want them to have that majority and keep that majority, so they went and found someone who isn’t part of it.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So, what does this mean for policy? I mean, we’ve talked about Turning Point. This obviously seems like not terrible for them.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It’s good for them. So, Turning Point had put a lot of money and effort into this SRP election, which typically kind of flies under the radar, and had much greater turnout this year than usual, which drew our attention and drew eyebrows. But Turning Point didn’t succeed in getting that majority on the board, but they did succeed in getting the president and vice president seat. So, that really comes into play if there is a tie. And now that we’ve got this 7-7 clean energy, non-clean energy split, it could be that the power of that vice president seat and president seat just went way up, which is great for Turning Point.

MARK BRODIE: And what does that mean for the kinds of things that they’ll be voting on? Like, the kinds of ties, for example, the Turning Point-aligned president and vice president might be voting on?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Well, I think one thing to really look at probably going forward is going to be data centers, because the clean energy team is saying they want more renewable energy sources. They want to push for solar, they want to push for batteries. And they also are not in favor of building a bunch more data centers. They don’t like the idea of data centers using up energy. They want them to provide their own or just not come here at all, essentially. And so, I think that’s going to be one of the main differences is when it comes to those big, big data centers, are they going to vote one way or another with this board?

MARK BRODIE: Do we have a sense of where new board member Galvin stands on this?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, I asked him about that, and he said he’s open to everything. He says he’s open to renewable sources, solar, nuclear, whatever. But he considers himself to be a pro-business person. He said he’ll do whatever is best for the ratepayers. And so, for me, that was a little bit vague. I mean, that could be a lot of things. I think Galvin, you know, certainly has established himself as kind of a old-school conservative and very much a pro-business guy, so we’ll see what that means in the future.

MARK BRODIE: OK. That is KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez from the Politics Desk. Camryn, thank you.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: The rise in heatwaves in the US is not just dangerous to human health. It’s also driving more wildfires across the West. And it’s not just because it’s drying out forests and creating more kindling. John Abatzoglou is a professor in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced, and he and his colleagues are out with new research that proves the link. I spoke with him more about it.

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: We had this intuition that when there are heatwaves, we’d see an uptick in fire activity, but we really wanted to quantify just how important heatwaves are across the West and how they varied across the West. And we came up with this number that across the West, about 42% of the burned area happens either during or immediately following heatwaves. That’s a pretty, you know, that’s a pretty large portion of the overall fire activity that we see in the West.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow, yeah, definitely is. OK, so let’s talk about the why here, because this is where some of the nuance, I think, comes in. Because like we said, there’s an intuitive nature to this that, you know, heatwaves will dry things out, and then basically you have more kindling out there. But it sounds like other factors are at play as well.

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: That’s right, yeah. So, I think that that’s right. The main ... thing I think that we thought going into this is that certainly heatwaves dry vegetation out, making everything that much more flammable, and that’s a key component. But the other things I think that we uncovered here were were also useful, right?

One thing you definitely need for fire is ignitions. And one thing we see across a huge portion of the West is that during heatwaves, we see an increase in the number of lightning-caused fires. So, when you combine sort of dry fuels and lightning, that is not a great combination when it comes to fire activity.

Veronica Adrover

/

UC Merced

We also see during heatwaves, it’s — they’re chronic in nature. It’s not just one day. It’s day after day after day after day. And so, you get sort of this sequence of hot, hot conditions day after day that continues to drive fuels out, and that really sets the stage for, you know, continued growth of a fire.

And then maybe also the other thing is during heatwaves, it just doesn’t cool down at night. And typically, on fires, you know, at night, the fire behavior will start to calm down a little bit. Fires will lay down, and that will give fire suppression an opportunity to make some ground on a fire. But when we have elevated temperatures at night, fires can burn through the night, and so we we effectively have much longer burn hours for these fires.

LAUREN GILGER: Longer burn periods can lead to much more destruction, I’m sure. Tell us, John, how you went about studying this, right? There’s not been a lot of research done on this front, right?

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: There’s been certainly work looking at the role of weather and climate on fire, you know, not so much when it comes to heatwaves per se. But the approach here was to take, you know, about 20, 25 years of data on fire activity, on weather, ignitions, etc. And then to analyze this across different sections of the western United States. And one thing we we thought is we might see some differences between how heatwaves enable and drive fire in the deserts versus our forests. But the reality is it sort of it sort of contributes to increased fire activity pretty universally across the West —

LAUREN GILGER: Everywhere, right. So, I was going to ask that because obviously we’re in a desert region here in in Phoenix, but, you know, we have many forests throughout the state where we do see many more forest fires these days. Sounds like it’s like an equal opportunity phenomenon here?

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: Yeah, as long as there’s fuels. And that’s the thing, is in some of your in some of your desert systems, fuel can become a limiting factor. In the forests, the way that they’ve been managed, not so much. There’s plenty of fuel. And so there, there’s much more opportunity for heatwaves. But the same factors, drying fuels out, long burn periods, lightning ignitions, all those things are conducive to fire activity.

LAUREN GILGER: So, let’s talk, John, about how it is that you’d want this research to be used. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that — and this is one of many things I think right now that is sort of changing the way that we, not just here in the desert where it’s always been hot, but across the country, how we think about heat, right? Like, it’s not just a nuisance that it’s hot outside. They are a driver of wildfire activity. There could be, you know, so many more implications down the line. Did it change the way you think about heat?

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: Yeah, maybe. That’s a — I mean, I think I think we started this research a couple years ago. And this summer, just looking across much of the U.S. and Canada and Europe, we’re seeing stories of heatwaves and fire. And it’s impacting a lot of different facets of life and the economy in summer. And and certainly there are places like like Phoenix that are very accustomed to heat. Certainly that’s a little different than other places.

But fire is certainly a factor that influences people, you know, well beyond where a fire burns, right? Smoke can transcend country boundaries, for example. So, it is something that we are paying attention to more. There actually are not — when it comes to sort of weather warnings, there’s certainly weather warnings for heat issued by the National Weather Service that advise people to take it easy when we have heatwaves, alter their alter their behavior outdoors. We don’t necessarily have that for fires, at least codified in terms of heatwaves.

And one thing that this research may do along with other factors is increase the awareness of ... people such that when there are heatwaves, there’s a higher potential for fire. Be ready, don’t ignite things, right? Sort of the the behavioral activities, but also from the fire management perspective, to be sure that there’s resources that can be allocated in the event that ignitions break out during a heatwave.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, I mean, as we’re kind of getting at here, like there are many more heatwaves happening, it seems, across the country as climate change is leading to increased temperatures just about everywhere. Should we also expect more wildfires? Like if these two are going to go together, it sounds like we could think about planning, as you’re talking about there, a little differently.

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: Yeah, I think we we definitely have seen a significant uptick in fire activity over the past 50 years. More fires happen when it’s hot and dry. We are expecting more of that going forward, as long as there’s fuel available, vegetation, etc. So, we should plan for more fire. And realistically, we need to really sort of change our mindset in that we’ve done a really good job at avoiding fire for a long time. Fire is supposed to be on these landscapes, and the warming and drying climate is making it much more likely. So, we need to actually prepare for when a fire is coming so that we’re more resilient and can withstand it.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, we’ll leave it there. John Abatzoglou, professor in the School of Engineering at UC Merced, he worked on this study. John, thanks for coming on The Show. Appreciate you shedding some light on this.

JOHN ABATZOGLOU: Great, thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, along with a class schedule and a homeroom assignment, many students are still issued a locker. But who resets all those combinations?

VERNON NICHOLS: You’re up, you’re down, you’re squatting on the floor, and in the girls', there’s three different levels of lockers, and the boys', there’s two different levels.

MARK BRODIE: We’ll hear from a middle school locksmith who goes locker by locker each summer to make it happen.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, a federal judge says the Tohono O’odham Nation has no authority to stop the Trump administration’s efforts to build a border wall that cuts through its sovereign land. This because of a 1907 proclamation from Teddy Roosevelt. That’s right, this one goes way back in history. And here to explain it all is KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio, who covers indigenous affairs for us. Good morning, Gabe.

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So, the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation is one of few that exists on both sides of the southern border. It’s about 62 miles of it. And and the tribe doesn’t want the Trump administration’s border wall built through their reservation, so they sued not too long ago. We had you on The Show to talk about that. They asked the judge for an injunction to to stop construction crews that, you know, are kind of barreling toward them. What was their argument?

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: So, essentially, the nation was saying that, "Hey, you know, our reservation would be shrank as a result of the construction of the border wall," which, to your point earlier, was would be built along this 60-foot-wide stretch of land. It’s a strip that runs from like California all the way to New Mexico, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, which was established to essentially for the sole purpose of dealing with smuggling, particularly at that time opium smuggling, and now we’re seeing fentanyl, you know, coming in from Mexico to the US. And so, this comes as at a time when the nation’s saying this would diminish our land base, the 2.8 million-acre reservation, because it’s right along that, but also impact cultural, sacred sites. And those are the main points of contention there that the judge didn’t see eye-to-eye with the nation on.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, let’s let’s give us a little history lesson here, Gabe. You mentioned this Roosevelt Reservation, 1907 proclamation from Theodore Roosevelt, the president at the time. And this is basically a 60-mile kind of like buffer zone around the actual border. What’s the purpose of that? It it is not supposed to be sovereign land?

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: So, it’s technically handled or managed by the US federal government. So, it’s a very it’s 60-foot-wide line that essentially runs along the the border of the US, the US border and Mexico. So, Mexico southern, then the Roosevelt Reservation’s this very thin strip that kind of runs just north of the international boundary. And then, in the case of Arizona, you have the Tohono O’odham Nation, right, the the sovereign reservation that sits right just above the Roosevelt Reservation. And so, this is that battleground, so to speak, of where this border wall could be constructed. According to the the latest filing in the opinion, the contractor SLSCO, which is a Galveston-based Texas-based company, was awarded the contract. This money comes from the One Big Beautiful Bill from last summer, and the plan is that construction isn’t supposed to start until October of this year. And so, that’s kind of the timeline that we’re seeing following the denial of the preliminary injunction to halt future construction work there.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. But at this point, they can go forward. October is, you know, clock ticking. The tribe is is not giving ground on this, though. They say they’re going to keep fighting this in court. Tell us about what they have to say about this judge’s decision. I mean, they even a couple weeks ago were putting up no trespassing signs, right, apparently for crews warning them off, essentially?

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: That’s correct, yeah. There was there’s efforts now underway to also have monitoring, local community-run monitoring groups that are kind of surveillance, so to speak, the border wall and that area where where the border wall could be made. As it sits currently, there’s a four-foot vehicle barrier that kind of runs along this stretch of land. It’s not like completely open, and so, you know, as you drive along it, you’ll see like these kind of tracks and things of that sort that are set up to, you know, essentially dissuade people from crossing the border on vehicles or motorcycles and things of that nature. And there’s also periodic crossing points where they’re like cattle guards, and you’ll open it up, and you’ll contact someone from CBP, who will come down, and they’ll check the ID of the the Tohono O’odham Nation member, and then they can cross in across the border to Mexico. They use that for like pilgrimages and things to like the Sea of Cortez and places like that. And so, the nation has been very proactive with enforcing immigration policy in alignment with the US. As you know, there’s the Shadow Wolves, which is the only Native American tactical unit that deals with human traffic smuggling operations across the reservation, and that’s under, you know, DHS specifically. And there’s also a lot of work where they’ve established, you know, forward command operating bases that have been erected on the reservation in partnership with the federal government. They’ve kind of come to an agreement to say, "Hey, we would allow you to do this for the greater goal of maintaining control of of that border."

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting about this conflict between the Tohono O’odham Nation and the federal government here is that for a long time, they have worked with the federal government, this tribe, in in in stopping human smuggling, human trafficking, drug smuggling, etc., across that border. You mentioned the Shadow Wolves. What do the efforts look like on that front with the kind of long history of cooperation here?

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Yeah, there’s there’s traffic points, checkpoints right throughout the nation. There’s cooperative agreements that have been established with the Tohono O’odham tribal police department to work in tandem with, you know, the Customs Border Protection agents and DHS more broadly. As I mentioned, the the construction of these forward command operating bases and like detention pseudo-detention centers that are there to for those who cross the border, you know, and are apprehended. And also, there’s, you know, basically towers, about at least 10 of them, I believe, that are used for surveillance. That includes things like cameras and monitoring along that 62-mile stretch of the reservation that touches Mexico.

LAUREN GILGER: But this, basically, they’re saying this is one step step too far for the tribe.

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: That’s correct. Yeah, as we’ve had discussions with, you know, Chairman Verlon Jose and others, that essentially the construction of an actual border wall is diminutive in the sense that they’ve already been doing a lot of management in stopping crossings. The chairman had cited in previous years as, I believe, as much as 95% reduction in overall crossings through that area because of the cameras, because of the increased presence of CBP, and those cooperative agreements that are already in place, and they feel that the actual physical structural apparatus of a border wall is too much to bear.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, I mean, you mentioned sacred sites, some of which have already been kind of bulldozed in the process of building this border wall. What’s the tribe’s concern there?

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: You know, in the past, the nation was promised things from the federal government that, for example, places like Monument Hill weren’t going to be impacted, but were blasted essentially. That was in 2020 or so around the time when the initial border wall was being built. And other places that are off the reservation on ancestral territory lands within Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, like Quitobaquito Springs, which is the desert oasis that we’ve talked about in the past. So, there’s a lot of places that are known, and there are many that are unknown to the public because of the sacred nature, the the Tohono O’odham Nation would not obviously disclose where these sacred mountains or other sites are to the government, because it’s their property and and their responsibility to protect those things, and to keep them out of out of harm’s way. And so, that’s part of this challenge is that there are places, as the chairman has told me, that they can’t disclose to the government because of that very reason. And so, that is a vote of contention here with the environment, and the judge ruled that essentially the immigration enforcement issues supersede any quote "irreparable harms" that may come from essentially the construction of the border wall there.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. Lots to watch for here as the clock ticks down to October. Gabriel Pietrorazio joining us, covers indigenous affairs here for KJZZ. Thank you so much.

GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. The ASU football team kicks off its season in about three weeks, hosting Morgan State in Tempe. And when the new season starts, there will be some new features across the Big 12. The conference, which includes both ASU and U of A, has reached a new deal with Monster Energy. The conference describes it as a first-of-its-kind agreement. The deal is worth $20 million a year. That’ll mean about a million dollars a year for each conference school. In exchange, football and men’s and women’s basketball players will wear a co-branded Big 12-Monster Energy patch on their uniforms. There’ll also be logos on fields and courts. The regular seasons will also bear the company’s name. Dylan DITTRICH writes the the new Yahoo Sports Business newsletter for Yahoo Sports. He joins us to talk more about this arrangement. And Dylan, this seems like kind of a unique situation. So, what do you make of it and what have you heard from folks in this world about it?

MARK BRODIE: Dylan, this seems like a unique situation, so what do you make of it and what have you heard from folks in this world about it?

DYLAN DITTRICH: Yeah, I think the initial reaction was very loud, as it can be whenever something very new happens in the sports business landscape. And look, this is all new, right? This idea of jersey patch sponsorship in college sports and this kind of pursuit of revenue in college sports — while not in it in and of itself a new trend — the ways that that schools are kind of unlocking revenue, many of those methods are new.

And I think what the Big 12 has done here is something that’s innovative, pooling and selling conference assets to a partner like Monster Energy is something that hasn’t been done before. And so while I think was a lot of a lot of noise in the reaction, the reality is that we don’t have a lot of precedent to judge this deal by yet. And so there’s a lot more that we’re going to learn about it in time about how it stacks up, about the puts and takes of the deal and whether or not it’ll be a success, and a lot of that will play out in time.

MARK BRODIE: Does that make it maybe premature to try to judge who got the better of this deal, and if maybe, for example, I’ve seen some reporting that, you know, folks are saying the Big 12 didn’t get enough for for what they gave, that kind of thing? Is that maybe premature given, as you say, that this is such a new thing?

DYLAN DITTRICH: I think so, absolutely. I think, yes, to your point, it seems like the the loudest reactions and the majority reaction was was that idea that the dollar value associated with this deal seemed low given kind of the the assets included. You’re talking about football and basketball entitlement partner, jersey patches across those sports, court and field placement. These are considered to be very, very valuable, very premium assets that Monster Energy has gotten access to.

And so when I think people heard that headline $20 million number and what that equates to on a per-school basis — in the million-dollar area — I think people were underwhelmed. But I think there’s no precedent really to use to be underwhelmed by this.

Most schools haven’t even sold their kind of individual patch inventory yet, and so the data really isn’t out there in a meaningful way just yet. And I also think that there’s more to this deal than just the kind of headline dollar figures alone.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that there’s a chance that the deal with Monster Energy could maybe hinder schools in the Big 12 from making their own deals, like if they want to make a deal with maybe a competitor to Monster Energy, for example, like could this prove problematic for some Big 12 schools?

DYLAN DITTRICH: I think it makes it a more complicated equation, right? I think as the pendulum kind of swung away from that initial reaction of, “Oh, this is a cheap deal,” to, “Hey, this is just found money, and schools can still sell their own deals so any conference deal is just kind of incremental revenue.”

I think the reality is somewhere in the middle, right? I think the conference-level deal takes some potential school-specific partners off of the table, right? You’re not going to have schools that have energy drink jersey patch sponsors that are competitors to Monster now.

And I also think there’s probably some reduction in appeal to potential school-specific partners based on the fact that they’re essentially going to be sharing space with Monster Energy now. There’s probably an opportunity cost to to the conference-level deal relative to what schools might get if that deal didn’t exist

But we don’t know that for sure yet. We’ll see that play out in terms of what schools are getting, and it’s going to be kind of tough to isolate what could they have gotten absent this idea this Monster deal versus what they ultimately get with it.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the sense, and maybe do folks in the sports business world get the sense that this could be a precedent-setting deal, that the next conference that wants to make a deal will look at this one, and companies that are looking to make deals, sponsorship deals with conferences, will look at this one and say, “OK, we think we can do this differently. We think this set the market here.” Like, does this set the precedent for the next conference?

DYLAN DITTRICH: Not necessarily. I think it’s it’s important in that it’s a data point and it’s out there, and there aren’t many of them to use as precedents at the moment. But every conference is different, right? And you think about certainly a Big Ten or an SEC is going to command more money if it chooses to do something similar.

And they very well may not choose to do that. This may be something that the Big 12 kind of goes it alone in or you see other conferences do. But every conference has kind of a different situation, different set of inventory, different schools to market, different geographies.

But at the same time, this is a key data point in a market that doesn’t have a lot of them right now. So certainly, there will be a fair bit of nodding to this number, I would imagine.

But as I was saying before, too, I think that the headline number, the dollar figure, the money changing hands — that’s only one piece of this deal, right? And I think there’s a huge marketing component to this deal.

Monster is a — pun intended — marketing monster. They spend so much money promoting their products, marketing, and the Big 12’s going to be attached to so much of that now, both nationally and internationally. So, I think there’s a lot of value here that extends beyond just those headline dollar figures.

MARK BRODIE: You think value for the Big 12 to be associated with Monster, or value for Monster to be associated with the Big 12, or both?

DYLAN DITTRICH: I think I think both, but in my comments, primarily referring to value that the Big 12 can derive from being part of that Monster marketing machine. I think that’s a company that’s showing up and facing the consumer, not just across the country, but across the world.

And this is a conference in the Big 12 that wants to be innovative, that wants to kind of expand beyond its regional footprint. It’s a conference that’s holding international football games, holding games overseas, that wants to kind of plant its flag outside of its traditional footprint.

And I think a partnership like this with kind of a consumer giant like Monster has the potential to help them do that, and that’s something that I think people tend to overlook or maybe underrate when it comes to this deal.

MARK BRODIE: What do you think that this deal tells us about the economics of college sports at the moment?

DYLAN DITTRICH: Well, we’re seeing an ongoing trend of kind of the professionalization and the commercialization of college sports. These athletic departments, after the House settlement, they have big big expenses that they need to cover to be competitive — and not just cover those expenses, but to grow and and kind of become bigger properties.

And I think there’s very much an attitude of no stone left unturned and of being innovative to find new opportunities for revenue generation, and there’s a lot of different forms that that’s taken. And this is just one of them, but it’s it certainly doesn’t feel like anything that’s going away anytime soon.

I think we’re going to see the pendulum continue to shift towards commercialization, towards professionalization, and yeah, really trying to tap revenue streams and kind of maximize the business potential of these athletic departments, perhaps in ways that haven’t been done before.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Dylan Dittrich. He writes the Yahoo Sports Biz newsletter for Yahoo Sports. Dylan, nice to talk to you. Thank you.

DYLAN DITTRICH: Great to talk to you as well, Mark. Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Each year, the Grand Canyon Conservancy welcomes a host of artists, scholars, and scientists from across the world to its residency program. The idea is to give them a chance to practice their work in this culturally rich place and engage with visitors to the park at the same time. And the next artist to head West as a part of it is Alessandra Vertrees, a multidisciplinary artist, software engineer, and food storyteller who will be tracking her maternal family heritage in nearby Williams, Arizona, during her time at the Grand Canyon. She plans to do genealogical research, gather stories, and explore the local ingredients of the region that connect it all together. I spoke with her more about it and how far her family goes back in Williams.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: My grandmother was born there, and her mom was born there, and my great-grandparents met in Williams. My great-grandfather is from Sinaloa, and then my second great-grandmother onward, they were born in New Mexico. So, the roots in Williams are really short, but there’s a lot of family that was close to my grandmother and extended family buried in Williams, including my grandmother herself. So, my first time in Williams was when we buried my abuela.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. And you grew up far from that, right? In kind of upstate New York and on a farm. So, it sounds like you you had a very interesting upbringing, but one that was sort of disconnected from these roots.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, exactly. Even extended family members like my abuela’s siblings did not know until the funeral, so very, very disconnected from not just the land they’re connected to, but the people within my family as well.

LAUREN GILGER: What did you think about that? Like, it sounds like you’ve been grappling with that sort of disconnect as you’ve been looking into this and trying to trace the the roots of your family.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, it’s been a huge void, and it was one that I, during COVID, was just that was my hobby was like trying to get closer to my family as close as I could on the computer with all the research and kind of get to know these people. And then eventually, I was just like, "I want to meet these people and like talk to them on the phone." But there’s a lot of trauma on that side of the family. They weren’t that close to my grandmother. So, we really couldn’t get close until she passed, unfortunately, but it’s been really beautiful ever since. Now that we’re all connected, I was just in Mexico with my great-aunt and her husband, and we got to really, really bond and get to know each other, and that was a really beautiful trip.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s amazing. So, I mean, did you learn something about your family, about the culture that you’ve been sort of disconnected from?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, I learned a lot. They grew up pretty rough in the beginning, so there’s also this disconnect in my experience, not just growing up on a farm in New York, but like this kind of class experience that I’m not familiar with that I’ve also been trying to learn about, but just trying to really get an idea of what life was like for my family.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so let’s talk about how food comes into this for you, because this is part of your practice, it sounds like, like food storytelling, I guess, for lack of a a better phrase. Where do these two kind of cross for you? This genealogical tracing of your roots and your family’s history and the food connected to that?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, there’s a lot there. I think the connection became really clear when I started jotting down recipes on my own after my grandmother died, and then I realized that a lot of things reminded me of her. And that, even though she was thousands of miles away in Los Angeles at the end of her life, our relationship was mostly on the phone, and we would always talk about what we were cooking. And when she would come and visit, or when we would visit her, we were always in the kitchen together. So, a lot of my memories of learning how to cook are with my mom and with her mom. So, there was a lot of stuff tied to that that I was like, "That’s actually really beautiful, and I’d like to explore that more." But before that, I was kind of treating ingredients as like materials, and then kind of thinking about the supply chain of them, and sourcing, and all this stuff. And this goes into growing up on the farm and being really close to a lot of really valuable produce, and dairy farmers, and all this stuff. So, I was like, "How do I be really intentional with what I’m using, and what boundaries do I want to use when I’m making things?" But I love cooking, so when I look at a recipe, I’m like, "How can I make this for me, or like make it different?" And that’s where a lot of the mapping goes into.

LAUREN GILGER: This idea of recipe mapping is very interesting. What will that look like?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, there’s like ratios for all the the recipes, and then there’s kind of a background of a kind of food science where, you know, you’re substituting carbs or proteins or whatever to get the same end result. So, there’s a way to do that with tech that I’m trying to explore. And then there’s also, I’m going to call it for lack of a better term, metadata associated with a recipe, location source, and like the history of it, and all this other stuff, so you can kind of imagine like a map of tracing how food is all connected, or like like a timeline, if if you will, of if you think of the Decolonize Your Diet movement, there’s like ingredients native to land, so there’s like this first layer of dishes that you can explore tied to geographical region. And then as time goes by, and people start trading amongst each other over larger distances, they’re introduced to different ingredients and techniques, and then you can kind of see how food has evolved to what it is now. When I’m at Grand Canyon, I’ll be exploring the the native plants of the region, particularly because we have native roots in that area, but also because my great-grandmother’s the story is that if you wanted to make her happy, you’d give her a bag of piñon nuts. She really loved them, and I really I thought it would be really special to make ice cream with those nuts that I can’t really find very easily. You can find them online, but I don’t really know anything about them as an ingredient, so just go there, get them, and learn from the people that have been living off of them for as long as they can remember.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And the Grand Canyon seems like it’s a really good place to kind of to do all of this, to connect these things.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Also, just like an incredibly iconic place. What are you looking forward to most? I mean, you get to live at the Grand Canyon while you’re participating in this in this project, and while you’re kind of doing this research. How do you think that will shape, contribute to, maybe change the way you think about some of this research and work that you’re doing?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: It’s an interesting question because right now I’m just like, "I can’t believe my backyard is going to be the South Rim, and I’m going to be able to look over the Canyon." And I remember we got to stop by, my brother and I, and kind of do a quick glance at the at the Canyon when we went out there for my grandmother’s funeral, so I’ve been before, and I was just enamored by the sheer scale of the Canyon. And I don’t know where where that’s going to take me when I’m there for, you know, two months, and I’m trying not to set too many expectations, but I’m also getting really excited just to be there and to be in the Southwest and like exploring the different microclimates in the areas, and what plants grow in those climates, and how that changes the the diet.

LAUREN GILGER: Sounds like you have a lot to look forward to.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, we’ll leave it there. That is Alessandra Vertrees, a multidisciplinary artist, as well as a software engineer and a food storyteller. Alessandra, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Good luck with this. It sounds like an incredibly beautiful opportunity.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: There are many traditions people think about as they prepare for a new school year: acquiring fresh pencils and notebooks, shopping for a new outfit, adjusting summer sleep schedules. But there’s one tradition most people probably don’t think about. For 19 years, Vernon Nichols has reset all of the locker combinations for Winslow Junior High School before the start of a new school year—all 700 of them. The Show’s Sativa Peterson returned to her old middle school to meet up with Nichols on a Saturday morning in late July.

SATIVA PETERSON: Remember trying to open a school locker for the first time? Spinning the dial, holding a small slip of paper with the code, turning clockwise to the first number, then counterclockwise to the next, hopefully pulling on the lock? The ritual is a rite of passage. But behind the scenes at some schools, it’s someone’s job to manually change each of those combinations, locker by locker.

VERNON NICHOLS: My name is Vernon NICHOLS, and I have been a locksmith since 1990. I started this 19 years ago.

SATIVA PETERSON: In Winslow, there is one junior high school. NICHOLS sets up his tools: pliers, masking tape, graphite, and WD-40. Facing rows of lockers, he divulges that each lock has five possible combinations inside its inner workings.

VERNON NICHOLS: And they rotate from one year to the next, and then they start back over, so if the kids are not back again, you know, then they—

SATIVA PETERSON: Clean slate.

VERNON NICHOLS: Clean slate, uh-huh. So, you stick the key in, open the locker, and the way the combination is changed, there’s a button on the backside. You rotate the the dial, push in on the button on the back, turn it for one digit, rotate the dial till it clicks, and the combination is changed. And sometimes, and you have to rotate the dial full 360 degrees. Okay, that one didn’t change.

SATIVA PETERSON: And and how did you know? You didn’t hear the click?

VERNON NICHOLS: Didn’t hear the click, and when you’re holding the button in the back, you can feel it and you hear it. When I first started, things were stiff, tight, and I really didn’t pay attention to that, and then I realized the more that they stayed that way, the more they got worse. So, I have started a repair and preventive maintenance schedule.

SATIVA PETERSON: And do your hands get tired, rotating all of the locks?

VERNON NICHOLS: Uh, yeah. I usually can work about two or three hours. You’re up, you’re down, you’re squatting on the floor, and in the girls', there’s three different levels of lockers, and the boys', there’s two different levels.

SATIVA PETERSON: That’s a lot of squats and bending.

VERNON NICHOLS: This is my summer exercise time. Turn, release. That one didn’t reset to the proper one.

SATIVA PETERSON: So, they’re finicky?

VERNON NICHOLS: They’re finicky, yeah. When I’m finished and it’s working correctly, I’ll set the the dial to zero. Then when I get through doing repairs, maintenance, everything, I’ll walk through and look at every lock and see if it’s on zero, I know I’m through.

SATIVA PETERSON: Oh, that’s smart. I’m starting to realize just keeping track of the different issues is probably more work than the actual changing.

VERNON NICHOLS: Yeah, the more things acting up or not working correctly, the less I could do. If they were all working great and no problems, I could do about 100 to 120 an hour. I doubt very many people think about how this is done individually. Most thought, "Oh, mean you got to take the locks off of every locker and put a new one on it?" They says, "Well, no, there’s five combinations in each lock." And I’m going like, "Okay, I’m used to padlocks. They have one combination. How do you get five in there?"

SATIVA PETERSON: Well, yeah. It’s a little piece of magic, mechanical magic in our world.

VERNON NICHOLS: Yes, it is a piece of mechanical magic. Some people are interested, some are not. Okay.

SATIVA PETERSON: How much longer do you think you’ll keep doing this?

VERNON NICHOLS: Well, I had somebody tell me recently, says, "I should quit, just be fully retired." But it’s fun. Who’s going to take my place?

SATIVA PETERSON: That was locksmith Vernon NICHOLS in Winslow, Arizona. For KJZZ’s The Show, I’m Sativa Peterson.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.