Nothing like the excitement of state championship football

By AL PICKETT / Sports Editor

It was 22 years ago that a college senior in Kansas, trying to help pay expenses, took a part-time job doing play-by-play of high school sports on a new FM radio station.

That year, a girls basketball team in a neighboring small town won a state championship - and he got to follow them all the way to the title game.

I've been hooked ever since. There is nothing to match the excitement of a high school team going for a state championship and the enthusiasm of an entire community getting behind it.

I remember telling someone at the time that I got to cover a state champion in my first year in the business; I might go the rest of my career without having that opportunity.

Fortunately, over the last 22 years I have covered a number of state championship teams - in three different states. But each time it's every bit as exciting as the previous.

It's a little bit different in Abilene, a larger city with multiple high schools. But it's been gratifying to see the signs all over town the last several weeks congratulating the Cougars and wishing them well. At this point, rivalries should be put aside; Cooper is all of Abilene's team this weekend.

This opportunity just doesn't come along very often. It's been 29 years since Cooper played in a state championship football game and 40 years since an Abilene public high school won a state football championship.

State championships, I think, are even more exciting when they are unexpected.

Oh sure, occasionally a team is ranked No. 1 at the beginning of the year andbreezes unbeaten all the way through the playoffs to claim the top prize.

More often, however, the state champion is a team like Cooper, which was unheralded - and unranked - at the beginning of the season but catches fire at the right time.

Cooper coach Randy Allen says this year's Cougars have improved more from the beginning of the season to now than any team he has ever coached.

That's what state champions do. State titles are not won in September or October. A 16-week season is a very long football season, and teams must be playing their best football at the end, something that Cooper has certainly done.

Another thing that state champions do is survive a scare somewhere along the way during the playoffs, finding a way to snatch victory from the certain jaws of defeat.

Remember the Wylie girls state championship basketball team in 1990? The Lady Bulldogs needed a shot at the buzzer by Lynn Corn to beat Coahoma in the area round en route to its Class 3A state title.

This year's Cooper team has also dodged a pair of playoff bullets, avoiding overtime when Dominic Rhodes went 57 yards for a touchdown on the final play of the game for a 20-14 bi-district win over Amarillo High and then edging Richardson Lake Highlands, 24-21, on Courtney Martin's second-chance field goal try in overtime in the semifinals last week.

It will be exciting Saturday as thousands of Abilenians make the three-hour trek east to Texas Stadium - and thousands more watch on television - to see if Cooper can bring a long-awaited state championship football trophy back to Abilene.

There is nothing quite like it.

Special edition

Local football fans will want to get our special edition "Cougar Plus" in Friday's Reporter-News. Besides statistical information and starting lineups on both Cooper and Austin Westlake as well as the key matchups in Saturday's title game, it also includes an overview of the Cougars' amazing season and a feature on the glory days at Abilene High when the Eagles won three straight state championships in 1954-56 and other feature stories.

It's a great collector's item to commemorate Cooper's 1996 season. (Call 915-673-4271 and ask for Circulation if you want to buy extra copies).