Don’t take good things for granted

After Friday night’s game in Rockdale, I stopped by CEFCO for a late night snack.

While waiting in line with a bag of chili cheese Fritos, I started to wonder who ended up winning Thorndale’s district championship game with Hearne. Of course, when I made it up to the cash register, I lost my train of thought.

But when I got outside the store, I immediately saw two girls with Thorndale shirts on.

I asked, “Hey y’all, who ended up winning?”

They told me Hearne did, to which I replied with mild profanity since I really wanted Thorndale to win.

To my surprise, one of the girls responded enthusiastically with, “It’s okay, we still made the playoffs!”

Just to back things up a little bit, Thorndale is a school that has enjoyed a fair amount of success for a long time in many sports and had a lot of success in football with state titles in 1989, 1994 and 1995.

Although Bulldog football has been a playoff regular since that period of football glory, they’ve never quite made it back to that level of success on the gridiron.

In the 2000s, while Thorndale basketball and baseball together racked up three state titles and many more state tournament appearances, the Bulldogs always seemed to encounter a team like Chilton that would stop them dead in their tracks.

In recent years, they’ve had the misfortune of running into Refugio, a program that’s had three state titles since 2011 and also lost the state title game three times during that period. In the last four years, Thorndale has faced the Bobcats three times in round two of the post-season.

Why did the Bulldogs keep running into one of the most successful high school football programs in the state year-afteryear? A big part of their annual deja vu was never getting past Holland, a consistent district favorite that Thorndale hadn’t defeated since 2013.

Coach John Kovar said that every year, there was always a chance for them to beat the Hornets, but something always seemed to go wrong.

Losing that one district game to Holland every year meant that they finished at best in second place and even if they had a favorable matchup in the first round, all roads still led to Refugio in the second.

But this year, in Kovar’s second year as head coach, Thorndale took down Holland 35-14 and they’ve had reporters like Rick Cantu from the Austin-American Statesman make their way down to Bulldog Stadium to see what’s going on in the western part of Milam County.

Fans flock to see the defensive prowess of players like Stryker Leschber, who has multiple Division I offers, and Hayden Kylberg, a 2021 state powerlifting champion who will be a great steal for someone’s roster next fall. They also flock to see quarterback Coy Stutts connect with receiver Clason Beasley, who has 839 yards on just 23 receptions this season.

The point of all this is that people in Thorndale are excited about football and are just grateful to be having this much fun.

Although they never went 0-20 over the course of two seasons like another area school (*cough cough* Taylor), it made me think about how good Rockdale has had it, in terms of football.

As of Friday, we’ve now made the playoffs 10 years in a row and have reached the post-season 14 out of the last 15 seasons.

This is a program that, prior to former head coach Jeff Miller’s arrival, only won two playoff games in the previous seven seasons and although the 1990’s were very good to Rockdale football (and other sports), the Blue-and-Gold had a period of time from 1981 through 1991 when they only finished higher than fourth place once, and this was in an era where only two teams made it to the post-season.

Nowadays, we get rave reviews from Texas Football magazine and any year that we’re not picked first or second by them is considered a down year. Let that sink in, if we’re not picked to win district or at least finish as the runner-up, we consider it a bad year, and that’s not a bad problem to have.

And when you throw in the fact that we have a high standard of winning in a place where, according to the 2019 census, the median household income is $39,598 per year, it’s all the more impressive that the last 15 years were able to happen.

(For perspective, the median household income in Little River-Academy is $69,391 and Thorndale’s is $58,917, meaning the average family in Thorndale earns a little more than $1,600 per month than the average family in Rockdale.)

Despite the bulk of industry leaving town and leaving the people here to pick up the pieces, this town has built something, and something bigger than anybody who has rooted for Rockdale football all their life could ever ask for.

So please, don’t take good things for granted, because it can be much worse.