WAKE UP! ON ETBLITZ.COM | Congrats to players of the year, and balloon race winners; 7-on-7 coming; special announcements; Tyler Herro is an idiot (w/VIDEO)
EDITOR’S NOTE: You know what I’ve got right now? I’ve got the summer blues. No, really, I do. I’ve got the Summer Blues Zinger in my cup holder, from Cozy Coffee Station, a coconut and cotton candy-flavored spectacular. And it’s just that. Check out that and more on their menu right here, Home | Cozy Coffee Station, and then get to their locations in Gilmer, at 755 Highway 271 North, or in Kilgore, at 110 Midtown Plaza, and maybe they’ll do one for YOU, too. Or maybe they WON’T, and I’m just special. (I guarantee they’ll do one for you if you order one. I’m not that special).
Whataburger / ETB Players of the Year
You know who’s special? The winners of the Whataburger / ETBlitz.com Players of the Year, Overton’s Bryce Still and Gladewater’s Paytin Thompson; the runners-up, Kilgore’s Jayden Sanders and Tatum’s Kamdyn Scott, and honestly, all the kids who were nominated or even played high school sports in this past school year.
We enjoyed covering all of you guys, and we’re looking forward to another great year in 2025-26. We launched this site in October ’23, and we’ve had some fun.
There’s more to do this summer – more on that below – but August will be here before we know it.
Still (no pun intended), congratulations to Bryce and Paytin. It was SUPERCLOSE, but congratulations, guys.
If you missed it, here’s the story from Sunday: THE WHATABURGER / ETBLITZ PLAYERS OF THE YEAR AWARDS… | Congratulations to Overton’s Still, Gladewater’s Thompson.
Champions crowned
The Great Texas Balloon Race, which crowns the U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championship for the Balloon Federation of America – seriously, guys, a big deal in that world – finished up this past weekend, and here are the folks who won their various categories.
National championship:
Joe Zvada of McAllen took first place in his balloon, Memories and a Dream. Landon Kohtz piloted Heatwave to a second-place national finish, from Hopkins, Michigan. And San Angelo’s Joe Heartsill, in Texas Racer, finished third.
In the Great Texas Balloon Race category:
Longview’s Bill Baker was first, piloting Check Six. Lillian Speicher, also from Longview and piloting Dawn’s Light, was second. And Geoffrey Jones, flying Zephyrus, was third, from Meridian, Mississippi. Hey, Geoffrey: say hi to Meridian for me. I lived there for four years, and my son was born there. Great city.
In the Young Guns category, Patrick Nilz flew Moose to the win – Patrick is from Marana, Arizona. Maddie Jones from Overland Park, Kansas, took second, with some Chaos. Actually, that’s the name of her balloon. And it worked. And Geoffrey Jones was back from Meridian in Zephyrus to take third in the Young Guns.
Congratulations to all these winners, and to everybody who came out. I know the rain was a drag, but it sounds like no one was disappointed, and that it was a great time again this year.
What’s coming on ETBlitz
We still have a few things to do this summer.
Kilgore has a team in the Texas State 7-on-7 Football Tournament, at Veterans Park in College Station. The actual dates on that are June 26-28, and ETBlitz will have a crew there. The Bulldogs got to the state semifinals last year. We’ve done several items already this year, and when it gets just a little closer, we’ll have a preview. Here’s some particulars, if you’d like to know more, or are thinking about going: WAKE UP! ON ETBLITZ | Thompson, Priest, Bynum are track Super Elite; 7-on-7 reminder; will the balloons fly?
You didn’t hear it from me, but there might possibly, maybe, possibly be the outside chance, maybe that we might possibly… OK, WE’RE ADDING TWO SCHOOLS TO THE COVERAGE AREA. OK? LOL.
We are, in fact, adding two schools, two athletic departments, to the ETBlitz.com coverage area in August. We can’t just add one: that would give us 13, and nobody does that. It’s just, I don’t know, just not right to have 13.
Already, we cover Kilgore, Henderson, Gilmer, Gladewater, Tatum, West Rusk, Sabine, White Oak, Arp, Troup, Overton, and Leverett’s Chapel. These two will move that dozen up to 14.
And when we announce it, in somewhat phenomenal fashion, it’ll be great.
To quote Mel Gibson, as Riggs, from Lethal Weapon 2, when he was asked how they’d know the signal: “You’ll know it when you see it.”
Tyler Herro’s lesson of the day
Now, to this idiot.
For those of you who don’t watch the NBA – and judging by their ratings, that’s a bunch of ya – Tyler Herro is a player for the National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat.
They once gave Tyler a pack of Kool-Aid and told him to make some, as a test, but he couldn’t, because he couldn’t figure out how to get two quarts of water into one of those little packs. You know what I mean? Tyler is not too bright.
Case in point: this little ditty from the weekend: Heat’s Tyler Herro makes wild comments about history | Fox News.
Tyler was on a Twitch stream over the weekend with a pair of individuals named Adin Ross and N3on, and was asked whether or not NBA hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain – who played in the 1960s and into the ‘70s – would be a top-five player in today’s league. Chamberlain is noted for once scoring 100 points in a game, and is thought of, along with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Earvin “Magic” Johnson and others as one of basketball’s top-10 players of all time.
Tyler answered that he didn’t know what Wilt “looked like” when he played and that he did believe Wilt scored 100 points in a game.
?
According to the Fox News link I shared with you – and this story is everywhere, I just picked that link – that’s when things got crazy.
Tyler decided to ask the hosts if they thought “history was real.”
“Yeah,” Ross asked, somewhat incredulously.
That’s when Herro said: “Nah, I don’t believe in history.”
Tyler went on to say that he A.) didn’t believe man landed on the moon and B.) didn’t believe in ANYTHING THAT HAPPENED BEFORE 1950.
He asked the crew on the set how we actually knew Columbus sailed west and landed in what is now the Bahamas.
“For real, like, how do we know? When did he come to the land or whatever?” Herro asked. “They said 1492?”
If you’d like to hear this bastion of intelligence for yourself, I caution you on some of the language used, but you can do so below. *Parental advisory*, as we used to see back in the ‘80s.
Oh, by the way, Herro is 25, if you’re wondering, and was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He went to college at the University of Kentucky. I’m not blaming them, I’m just saying.