The "Feel Good" Story of the Year

    In March of 2012, the boys basketball team from Texline High School, in the far northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle, made a very impressive run to the state semi-finals, which were played in Austin at the Frank Erwin Center at the University of Texas. They lost the semi-final game, in overtime, to Roxton, a team from northeast Texas, in Lamar County. Roxton is a team that was completely destroying every team they met in the playoffs. Roxton was an extremely talented team that played like a well-oiled machine. Yet, the Texline Tornadoes, from an obscure town in the northwest corner of the Panhandle, took Roxton to overtime and almost won the game.
  Texline High School has only 36 students and only 14 of them are boys. 11 of the 14 boys were on the basketball team and this unlikely team came close to winning the state championship.
   At the "Final Four" in Austin, a lot of people were asking "Where's Texline?" The Texline Tornadoes became the "media darlings" of the state Final Four when it was learned how far they had to travel to get to Austin and the fact that 11 of the 14 boys in the school were on the basketball team. Texline had to travel 627 miles to get to Austin! That is the farthest anyone has ever traveled to get to the state Final Four in Texas high school basketball history.
  Towns in the upper Panhandle waved the Texline bus through their town as the bus made its long trip to Austin. Many farmers and ranchers in the area, in both Texas and New Mexico, held fund raising activities to raise money to send the Texline Tornadoes and many of their fans to Austin.
  This is what high school sports is all about, the only thing missing is the fact that Texline did not bring home a state championship. Stories like this are what I like to see. This is truly a "feel good " story and one that needs to be told.
   Begging my readers' indulgence, in the next edition of this blog, I am going to write about a different part of the country and abandon my project about the upper part of the Texas Panhandle. My mind wanders a little too much for my own good and I think it is probably best for me to keep "jumping around' and write about what is most interesting to me at that time. I want to write more about this state that I often daydream about, but have only been there a few times. I hope to visit this particular state some more in the future, but for now, I want to write about this state some more because it is at the forefront of my thoughts now.