WAKE UP! ON ETBLITZ.COM | It’s Sunday’s edition, with all kinds of stuff mixed up in a bowl

EDITOR’S NOTE: Well, Mitch Lucas is cooked – like literally. He’s treating himself with Aloe and we’re flipping him every hour or so with a giant spatula. Not literally. Cozy Coffee Station has almost as many drink choices as Mitch has seen sports. If you want to see all those choices, check this out: Home | Cozy Coffee Station. And if you want to go by and pick one up, do so in Gilmer at 755 Highway 271 North and in Kilgore at 110 Midtown Plaza!

A great wrap-up

I was going to do the finish, the wrap-up, for 7-on-7 last night, but Joe Hale went along for the ride with us to College Station and wanted to write something.

Joe’s column is (fittingly) called “From the Press Box,” where he’s been hanging out for something like 42, 43 years, and he’s pretty funny, and observant, as you need to be to be a sportswriter. With Joe’s observations, I put our game box scores with it, mixed in a few excellent shots from our own Alex Nabor, and we came up with this wrap-up: FROM THE PRESS BOX | By JOE HALE / The fun that was 7-on-7, from the heat, to the lightning, to the on-the-field lightning (with box scores the best we could and MORE of Alex’s photos!).

We think you’ll love it. But I didn’t add a few of my own observations, and I’m about to do that now. Y’all ready? Ready or not, here we go.

1. This is a need-to-know. I didn’t do pool games. Couple of reasons for that. We left PLENTY early on Thursday morning to get there, but got behind the moving of a building on Highway 79 that left us at a crawl. I’m not blaming the folks, and they did have a handful of motorcycle policemen as escorts. We were vehicle No. 1 behind the building, who pulled out onto 79 in Oakwood. But we moved about 22 miles per hour until they departed the highway in Buffalo, and Alex, who doubled as our driver, finally breathed a sigh of relief. But we got to Veterans Park and were initially told Kilgore was playing on one field when they were playing on the other; we missed the first few minutes of Kilgore-Austin LBJ. So since we didn’t have those numbers, I decided to only include Friday’s box scores in Joe’s column.
2. If you’ve ever (or never?) seen a 7-on-7 game, the rules are a little different from regular 11-man football, and while we have most everything recorded, I did miss a couple of things: the first score against Columbia (the game started a little early, as we were walking up); I may have one of the conversion passes to the wrong person against La Marque (I wrote that it was Devin Tinney – pretty sure it was either Devin or T.K. White); and I missed the opening score against Panther Creek. I was off my game a little bit.
3. There’s a good bit of talking the officials let go on back and forth between the players. It’s kind of like a pick-up game. It is fun, but I guess as long as everybody can police themselves, to quote Kilgore’s coaching staff this week, “we’re good.”
4. There is a crazy number of fields at Veterans Park – the place is MASSIVE – and Kilgore was blessed, very blessed, to only have to play on two of them on Friday, as opposed to last year, when it seemed like they had to move 51 times. On field 8A, though, one of the turf fields, it looked like the Line Vandals came out over the night and lost their minds. And one of the Mineral Wells coaches paid for it. The guy was ejected for standing in the end zone very early in the game against Kilgore. An official apparently had warned him, and the next thing we know, the official tossed the guy. I told one of our coaches you really couldn’t blame him. There were blue lines, yellow lines, white lines – if the police gave a sobriety test out there, we’d all have been locked up.
5. This just in: Kilgore was the most talented team on ANY field that I saw all week. Period.
6. This just in, part two: Bay City (and I mean the fans) had more mouth than anybody I HEARD all week. Period.
7. I know they fell short of the title, but congratulations to Kilgore for getting to the state championship game. Impressive run, impressive.

A couple of things

• This summer’s first Whataburger Personality Profile is coming up soon. I’m not telling you who it is. You’ll be surprised.
• Our special, HUGE announcement of the schools that will be added to the ETBlitz.com coverage area. And you’ll REALLY be surprised.
• Camp Central, sponsored by Energy Weldfab, is updated. CAMP CENTRAL, presented by ENERGY WELDFAB | Upcoming youth sports camps, updated June 29.