The game was never in doubt for the Cougars as they scored in all but one inning while limiting the Bears to runs in the first and sixth innings. Bastrop struck first when Catcher Cade Staton sent a solo shot over the left field wall in the top of the first after Tobler forced the first two Bears’ batters into grounding and flying out. Connally quickly responded however as they pushed three runs across in the bottom of the first. Back-to-Back RBI triples by Alex Torres and Dustin Babola were the highlights for the Cougars in their half of the first has they jumped on Bastrop pitcher Jaryd Hodgson early.

The Cougars’ kept their bats going in the third inning as Babola and Tobler sent singles into the outfield. Steven McMillan followed those at-bats with a two-run single that scored Babola and Hagen Katter (who came in as a pinch runner for Tobler).

After adding two more runs in the fourth and fifth innings the Cougars found themselves with a comfortable 7-1 lead at the end of five innings. Bastrop managed two runs in the sixth to close the deficit to 7-3, but the Cougars scored two runs of their own in the bottom half of the sixth to go back up by six runs. The highlights of the sixth inning for the Cougars were Tony Bryant’s solo shot over the left field wall that was followed shortly thereafter by a bases loaded single by Arisbel Pestana.

Connally’s Dominique Romo came in to relieve Tobler with one out in the top of the seventh and ended the game when Bastrop’s Colton Tucker hit into a double play.

Obviously it would take me forever to run down the whole bracket so I figured I’d just jump right to the elite eight. In the midwest I’ve got Kansas and Georgetown, Syracuse and Kansas St. in the west, Wisconsin and West Virginia in the east and Texas A&M and Baylor in the south. My final four is made up of Kansas, Kansas State, Wisconsin and A&M. Finally I have Kansas beating A&M for the national title.

I’m guessing a lot of you are rolling your eyes right about now, but I sincerely believe A&M has a legitimate shot to get that far. In my opinion Kansas has the best team in the country and twice the Aggies have given the Jayhawks all they could handle only to fade at the end of those games. Thus I am left to surmise that if A&M can almost beat Kansas they probably can beat anyone else. We’ll see how that theory plays out.

You also notice my bracket is very heavily Big 12. I even have Texas beating Kentucky and reaching the sweet 16. I don’t have one Big 12 team going out in the first round although I do have Oklahoma State and Missouri losing in the second. I’m not sure what this says about me or the state of the college hoops game. Probably that I am far too influenced by my surroundings.

Speaking of great basketball, I was watching “Magic & Bird: A courtship of rivals” on HBO as I was writing this week’s column. While talking about the first time the Celtics beat the Lakers in the NBA finals, former Laker Michael Cooper said he and Magic Johnson sat in the showers weeping for 45 minutes after they lost game seven of the finals. It made me wonder if guys still do that.

Maybe it’s because I’m older but I really don’t feel like today’s athletes take the winning and losing as personally as guys did back in the day. It seems to me they are way too rich to care that much. They are far more concerned about getting the biggest check possible.

One more thing that became apparent from the program – for a long time Magic and Bird really didn’t like each other. Bird especially really seemed to hate Magic (and pretty much everyone else he played against).

If you get a chance check out the show. It gives you the feeling there has never been two men who loved the game of basketball more than Magic and Bird. And it certainly will provide you with something to watch if you are looking to take a break from March Madness.

Pflag Reporter

Board of Trustees Place 3 candidate Rob Reyes serves as a board member for the Pflugerville Education Foundation, an organization that helps fund PISD programs by reaching out to private industry.

Working with the school district, Reyes has raised support for teacher grants, the Teacher of the Year program, and a program called Kick Start.

“Kick Start motivates students to help them in P.E., but also teaches them karate and self-discipline,” Reyes said.

Reyes earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas – San Antonio before beginning his career in the architectural engineering and construction industry.

Currently he works for a consulting firm that helps public-sector business owners manage construction programs to keep projects on time, on budget and meeting specifications.

He said his interest in the school board position was sparked when a city councilman encouraged him to run.

“I was asked to consider running for the trustee Place 3 position by Victor [Gonzales], who’s a mentor, City Councilman and community leader in our city. He asked me to consider running, and I thought about it, and I consider this a continuation of my community involvement with the district,” Reyes said.

Reyes also serves on the parish council at St. Elizabeth of the Hungry Catholic church and on the Wonders and Worries Ball Committee, which serves children with terminally ill parents through a father-daughter dance.

If elected to the PISD board, Reyes said he would strive to be budget-conscious and would like to ensure that tax dollars are spent in a way that most benefit students.

“I’m concerned that we spend our money in a responsible way on programs within the district that are focused on research-based learning curriculum for classrooms. I would like to look to the private sector and the Education Foundation to fund programs that are not research-based that have value and are necessary for our district – but not necessarily spend our tax dollars on those supplementary but needed programs.

Reyes’ wife is a behavior specialist in the district, and they have a daughter in first-grade and a son who will be in kindergarten next year.

“I have many ties to the district and I am interested in their continued success,” Reyes said. “We recently received services for my son through the special education department’s preschool early childhood development program. He had a speech impediment. He was stuttering quite a bit and we were very concerned. They came out to his preschool and worked with him and I’m happy to say that he does not stutter anymore, and he’s a product of successful early intervention. I have tremendous gratitude for the district for having that program.”

Reyes said one asset he would bring to the board is a keen political awareness.

“I’m interested in responsible spending of our tax dollars, and also aligning the district to receive federal funding,” he said. “Currently the district’s budget receives 3.5 percent of its budget from federal funding and there are some great programs that the Presidential administration is looking at funding. One of them is Rise to the Top – a program that focuses on math and science and college preparedness.”

Reyes said the strength of the board has been its vision and outlook, and thinks the programs in place are on target, from early childhood development to college readiness and preparedness. “Any criticism I would have would be to communicate those success stories to the public. I’d like to enhance communication between the city and the public to make them aware of the great things that are happening and receive their input,” he said “In a nutshell I guess you could say I’m committed to the quality education of young people in our district as well as responsible stewardship of our tax dollars.”

For more information on the Education Foundation visit pflugervilleisd.net/educationfoundation

“We’re having a Gala on April the 20th and the community of Pflugerville is invited to attend. It’s a great way to learn about what’s happening in the district and hear the success stories of the students and teachers,” Reyes said.

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com

By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

After its March 9 presentation to the City Council, TxDOT and Pflugerville seem to be in sync over the plan to sync up city traffic lights.

TxDOT maintains 15 signals along FMs 685 and 1825, and as many Pflugerville motorists are painfully aware, it can be hard to get in or out of town without being stopped by most of them.

“It’s a condition that citizens of Pflugerville have been concerned about for a number of years, because until recently it was the primary means to get in and out of town,” said Trey Fletcher, director of city development services. “We have better connectivity, but that need is still there to get those lights synchronized.”

Fletcher said last week’s update, which detailed plans and deadlines for the traffic project, was well-received by staff and council.

TxDOT traffic engineer Scott Cunningham told council members that the department will finalize plans for the improvements by May to be ready for bids by September. The news comes in spite of some speed bumps in funding that have caused contracts to be cancelled mid-project and workloads to be shifted.

“The year is going to be the leanest year in recent memory for pretty much every state in the country,” Cunningham said, referring to capitol improvement funds. “There have been significant cuts in funding, both federal and state.”

Originally TxDOT contracted Klotz Associates in Houston to do the traffic signal design for Pflugerville.

“Almost all of the consulting funding was cut statewide, except for a few select huge projects that couldn’t be stopped,” Cunningham said. “So 30 percent into the design Klotz was told, sorry, your contract’s been suspended, and consequently I was told ‘You have a new project to work on. By the way, it’s due in May.’”

According to Cunningham, the department is still on track to hit its deadline, and already has allocated funds to rebuild five signals along FM 1825 from the $1 million budget.

Wire-hung lights at the intersection of FM 1825 and Sarah’s Creek Drive, Vision Drive, Windermere Drive, 10th Street and Heatherwilde Boulevard will be replaced and mounted on mast arms. The new signals will also be synchronized to allow platoons of motorists to maneuver down the road without multiple stops.

“What happens is if one clock in one traffic signal is slightly different than the other clock in the other traffic signal, over time those differences cause clocks to drift, so all this programming that you’ve done gets out of phase, slightly off. So people start getting caught at the red lights.”

To remedy this problem, TxDot will install radio receivers and Ethernet into each light that will all be programmed to the same clock at a traffic headquarters. The radios will allow technicians to control the lights remotely, cutting down on maintenance time and cost.

“This system that we’re putting in – since each signal wirelessly will talk to a center point, they’ll actually be on the same clock via the system clock. That means that they wont be drifting anymore, and also it gives us the opportunity to change the timing if we have some special event or if something happens,” Cunningham said.

The technology as well as the timing of these improvements will pay dividends to the city as it officially tallies a population over 50,000 after this year’s census.

“It’s TxDot project. The city has been concerned about the effort and the implementation because of citizen concerns, but also because when the city of Pflugerville achieves its 50,000 population in accordance with the decennial census that we’re getting ready to take… the city becomes responsible for the maintenance of those signals,” Fletcher said. “So it’s been important to us to ensure that that package of signals that TxDot maintains along 685 and 1825 are synchronized correctly and in a condition which we can continue their operation maintenance most effectively.”

With deadlines in place and traffic signals planned out, TxDot navigates the final proverbial bump in the road as it plots pedestrian improvements for the sidewalks around its intersections.

“On this section of the roadway you have ditches on either side, so in order to get the pedestrian across you have to span that ditch,” said TxDot engineer Kevin Plumlee “It’s a little more involved than some other places in Austin… So that’s why we’re still deciding which intersections we’re going to do in that regard.”

In addition to accounting for the once-rural roads’ topographies, the department’s updates will have to meet standards set by the American with Disabilities Act, which Plumlee said can be ambiguous in some instances.

“A few of [the intersections] have very limited right of way. You combine that with the ditch sections and the ADA standards, and then it becomes a real challenge to get all that in there… which may require getting a little creative to try and get the pedestrian across the street safely and maintain the ADA requirements,” Plumlee said.

Despite their obstacle, Fletcher said TxDot seems to be moving in the right direction.

“It’s ok,” Cunningham said. “We’ll get them done.”

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com

Pflag Reporter

City staff is working to get Pflugerville wired.

Google has launched a nationwide contest for cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000 to apply to become a “Fiber Community.”

The technology giant is keeping details about the when, where and how of the contest close to its chest, but what is known is that the cities chosen as test markets will become equipped with Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than are currently available.

“Lot of cities that are applying for this, so we don’t really know what [Google] is looking for. It’s pretty vague. It does say they’ll be offering the fiber network at an inexpensive rate,” city Communications Director Terri Waggoner said. “I know that its going to bring a very high speed Internet… Having this come in, our city would be very wired, and being in the area that we are with a lot of technology companies around us, it would be a really big honor to have something like that come here. It would be something for economic development and other such things.”

The Google Web site states that the Fiber Communities will be aimed to innovate ways to improve ultra-high speed Internet access by building and testing 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.

“In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online video and countless other applications, ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to new innovations – including streaming high-definition video content, remote data storage, distance learning, real-time multimedia collaboration, and others that we cannot yet imagine,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail.

Waggoner said the city is filling out multiple questionnaires – one for city staff, one for City Council and on for residents.

“We don’t really know how they are going to pick the city they’re going to use,” Waggoner said. “And then there’s a bunch of questions asked about the city, like ‘how excited is your community about this coming to town?’ So they really what us to gauge what the community thinks.”

Austin IT Manager David Bunch said Google is probably looking for high-tech cities that can utilize the speedy connection to its fullest potential.

“Between Dell, Samsung right down the road, Nvidia’s got data centers here – there are just more companies than I can even bother listing that are in the area. We would see the benefits before other residents,” Bunch said.

Although Austin and Round Rock house tech giants in the Pflugerville area, both cities are submitting their own applications to Google to become a Fiber Community.

Despite the competition from high-tech neighbors, Bunch said it’s a win-win for Pflugerville if the network comes to the region.

“Google is probably looking on a bigger scale because this is a test environment. Say they don’t choose us first – we’d like them too, but say they don’t choose us first and they choose Austin or Round Rock, we’ll be right up there if they choose to expand this,” Bunch said. “We’ll be right there, and we’ve already completed this application and they already know that we’re interested, so all the more reason to come to this area if they’re interested. They can grow that market a little quicker if they choose to go that direction.”

Waggoner has posted a link to the resident application on the city’s Web site at cityofpflugerville.com/google.

She said community interest is imperative to Pflugerville’s chance to capitalize on this cutting-edge opportunity.

“I would love it if we had a huge significant amount of applications coming in from Pflugerville residents because that tells Google we mean business, we really want this to come.

The resident’s application asks why Google should build a fiber home network where you live and also encourages Web linking to supporting materials like Youtube videos as creative submissions.

“I don’t know how I get people to go make me Youtube videos for Google, but man, if they did, that would be awesome,” Waggoner said.

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com

The Cougars (8-7) fell behind 2-0 and 4-2 in the game but were able to tie things up in the bottom of the fifth, setting the stage for an exciting finish. Connally relief pitcher Zach Tobler, who took over for starter Dominique Romo, worked his way out of trouble in the top of the seventh to keep the game tied. Tobler walked the Knights leadoff hitter, J.T. Gilmore, to start the inning. Gilmore promptly stole second and moved to third on a ground ball by Evan Knutson which was the first out of the inning. Tobler retired the next two batters he faced, stranding Gilmore at third and keeping the game tied.

The contest appeared headed to extra innings after Harker Heights hurler Cody Newell, who was pitching in relief of starter Shawn Hanson, retired the first two Cougars he faced. Connally shortstop Dustin Babola had other ideas and he lined a base hit to keep the inning alive. Tobler followed Babola and he blooped a base hit into right field. Babola rounded second base on the hit, intent on taking third base. The Knights’ right fielder came up throwing, but overshot his third baseman and Babola was able to score on the error, giving the win to the Cougars.

Harker Heights jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning with a two-out rally of their own. Romo got the first two hitters he faced to fly out to center field, but an error on what should have been the third out of the inning opened the door for the Knights offense and they took advantage as Jose Torres blasted a two-run double to stake Hanson to a 2-0 lead.

Connally responded with a run of their own in the bottom of the frame. With one out, Alex Torres drew a walk and ended up at third base when Babola cracked a double. Tobler walked to load the bases and Ronnie Baker plated Torres with a sacrifice fly ball to right field.

The Cougars evened the score in the third inning, turning an Anthony Bryant walk into a run. Bryant led off the inning by taking a base on balls. He stole second and moved to third on a sacrifice bunt by Torres. Babola lofted a fly ball to left field to bring him home and tie the game at 2-2.

Two more Connally errors helped the Knights take a 4-2 lead and that was the score when the Cougar offense came to the plate in the bottom of the fifth. With one out Deandre Lankford and stole second base. Bryant followed him to the plate and drew a free pass of his own. A wild pitch moved the runners up another station and Lankford came in to score on a throwing error by the Knights’ catcher. Torres and Babola drew walks to load the bases and Tobler hit into a fielder’s choice to plate Bryant and tie the game at 4-4.

Tobler earned the win for Connally. He pitched one inning, allowing no hits and one walk. Newell took the loss for Harker Heights. Romo had a decent showing for the Cougars. He threw six innings, giving up five hits and no earned runs.

The Cougars followed the win with a 10-0 victory over Conroe’s Oak Ridge High. Tobler earned the win in the game.

Connally defeated Joshua High 9-3 in the championship game of the tournament. Babola was the winning pitcher.

Bryant and Babola were named the tournament’s co-offensive mvp’s. Tobler was the outstanding pitcher. Lankford was chosen the defensive player of the tournament.

“This was the best team effort of the season and our most complete game,” Connally coach John Mark Edwards said. “We really came together as a team in the end and finished on a good note.”

The seniors playing in their final game were recognized before the game and really stepped up by playing as a unit. From the opening whistle the Cougars took control and brought pressure on the visiting Panthers.

The Panthers had the first chance to make something happen off an intercepted pass that saw Ruben Lopez break in on goal as he fired a shot that Cougar goalie Brooks Grubb gobbled up.

The Cougars brought the ball up the field and won a free kick from about the 30-yard line which Bryan Gavarrete struck well, barely missing the mark.

The Panthers got on the scoreboard first with Lopez ripping a shot following a run through the defense with 29 minutes left in the first, putting Pflugerville up 1-0.

The Cougars turned up the heat as Jonathan Campuzano let loose a ringing shot that Panther Andy Martinec had to dive and save. The Cougars were relentless with their attack as they kept the pressure on, winning back-to-back corner kicks.

The second one was taken by Gavarrete who placed a nice pass to Jeff Anumu who headed it into the upper corner of the net to tie the game up with 24 minutes left on the clock.

The Panthers won a corner of their own and brought pressure afterwards. The Cougars grabbed the advantage by bringing the ball up the field and peppered the goal with shots. With 13 minutes remaining Campuzano cracked a shot that Martinec saved at close range.

The Cougars kept at it with tenacious play and were rewarded for their efforts. Gavarrete fed a timely pass to Anumu who blasted a shot that hit the post and came out to Campuzano who buried it in the back of the net making it 2-1 for the Cougars.

After halftime the Panthers brought in good ball movement and had several chances. Lopez let loose a laser of a shot that Grubb had to glove out for a corner kick.

The Cougars brought the ball up field and Kevin Del Aguila fired a shot from the 20-yard line.

The play got heated as several yellow cards were issued and penalty kicks were awarded to both sides. The last few minutes of the game brought a mad dash by both teams as chances appeared for both, however the score held.

Enrollment at the Austin Community College District’s Pflugerville Center increased more than 86 percent this spring, compared with spring 2009 figures, ACC officials recently announced.

Meanwhile, ACC is experiencing record enrollment college-wide. Spring 2010 data show 41,050 credit students, up from 36,601 students in spring 2009. That’s an increase of more than 12 percent.

“More people are recognizing the tremendous value of community college,” said Dr. Stephen B. Kinslow, ACC president and CEO. “ACC provides affordable academic transfer courses that are important to increasing higher education participation rates in our community, and the college also is expanding workforce programs that train and re-train residents for high-demand careers.”

ACC has 108 students at the Pflugerville Center this semester, up from 58 the year before. Spring enrollment at all of ACC’s centers increased by nearly 36 percent over last spring.

Most of ACC’s centers offer classes in communities that, like the city of Pflugerville, are within the college’s service area but outside the taxing district.

“This increase indicates a growing awareness of the affordable, quality education ACC offers,” said Dr. Luanne Preston, executive director of school relations and supervisor of the centers. “We are happy to provide access to higher education, not only within the district, but also across the region.”

Overall ACC enrollment from Pflugerville and northeast Travis County increased as well. Pflugerville counted 1,177 students, up more than 14 percent from spring 2009. Enrollment from Pflugerville/northeast Travis County (defined as ZIP codes 78660, 78753, and 78754) went up almost 13 percent.

This is the fourth consecutive semester with record-setting enrollment college-wide. In order to meet demand, ACC is hiring more full-time faculty and support staff as well as adding new classes.

The new Round Rock Campus is a key component of expansion; it will have an initial capacity of approximately 5,000 students and eventually serve more than 11,000 students. Round Rock ISD joined the ACC District in May 2008, after 64 percent of Round Rock ISD voters approved annexation in exchange for lower, in-district tuition and expanded programs and services.