The Abilene Factor
By Lew
September 9, 2004
Dear Big Country,
Since I am in the mood to write, and since I am not sure who all reads these nice blogs here since hardly anyone sends me any feedback, I thought I might broaden the scope of the blog just a bit and talk about Sweetwater and what I call the "Abilene factor."
I was raised in Sweetwater from about 1960 to 1970.
As a high school student looking for things to do, if we ever wanted to really do something extra-ordinary, we would go to Abilene.
Abilene was in our mind, much better to go to and do things. More people, more movies, there was always more of something in Abilene.
There was a time in the 1950's and early '60's Abilene High School and Sweetwater had some great football games. We sort of thought we were in the same ballpark as Abilene when it came to athletics - football anyway.
I beleive in some sort of way, we were a little jealous of Abilene. Abilene had much more to do, but they always came to the Mustang Bowl, so we sort of had this idea we should have the same as Abilene.
We never would have thought we would ever be in the same district as (cough, cough) Merkel, Wylie or Clyde.
Now, no disrespect to those towns but we were trying to be like Abilene, we didn't need any small town in our way.
Then a funny thing happened. Abilene got another school. Abilene Cooper.
I can still remember Jack Mildren in that championship game.
But the fact was, Abilene grew, and Sweetwater kept losing population and consequently fell from 4A all the way down to 3A.
Sweetwater won the 4A state championship in 1985. Remember Mike Welch?
Well, all things considered, there were 2 classes of 5A (large and small) 2 classes of 4A (large and small) and so on down to A.
There were district re-alignments and nothing was ever the same anymore.
Some of us old-timers remember how much fun high school football used to be.
I don't want to sound like an old geezer, but I wonder how many people care about it anymore? I can tell you I belong to Classmates.com where a whole generation of Sweetwater ex-students remember the good times at pep rallies, booster tags, and Mustang Bowl. Haven't we lost something?
Was it the Abilene Factor?
Lew
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