A Bright Future Awaits for My Favorite Town and Team
Mea culpa: I was wrong.
I wrote last summer that OU football should have national title aspirations and that it would be a "surprise" to see Oklahoma State beat them or play in the Big 12 title game. Well, the Cowboys did both, and came darn close to winning the conference, too.
What's worse, OU's Bedlam embarrassment was compounded just hours after the crushing loss with news that Lincoln Riley would be leaving for Southern Cal.
I'm here today to announce my own departure from the Sooner State. But I hope to leave on better terms than TBOW. And, as with Brent Venables and the OU program, I'm confident that the leadership here at the Watonga Republican will keep our newspaper thriving for years to come.
This was my second rodeo in Oklahoma. I arrived in Norman in fall 2012 just in time to watch Landry Jones' anticlimactic senior season. After that was a couple years of Trevor Knight and Blake Bell stringing together good-but-not-great years.
The program was stuck, and so was I. I thought I was going to be an actor. Then I left the drama program and started writing for the student newspaper. Then I was going to do sports PR, or maybe advertising. For a minute I was an Italian major. By my senior year, I'd pretty much given up on the conventional route and figured I'd join the military until I decided what exactly I wanted to do for a living.
The emergence of Baker Mayfield coincided with the beginning of my journalism career. It wasn't what I expected, and started humbly enough: as a green reporter at a modest paper in Brownwood, Texas, covering local events and a bad high school football team.
The Deseret News gave me a chance. With no other relevant experience to speak of, the legacy Salt Lake City newspaper gave me a parttime editing job that I started at the beginning of 2019, as Kyler Murray turned the OU program over to transfer Jalen Hurts.
That toe in the door at the Deseret News turned into a full-time reporting job in just a few months. And a couple of years later, it turned into an opportunity right back here in Oklahoma, to run my own newspaper just a few years after I entered the business as a cub reporter.
My tenure at the Watonga Republican, much like the 2021 OU football season, was a tumultuous one.
Two months after I arrived, the police chief was fired. Lawsuits were filed. There were suspicious deaths, ransomware attacks, police shootings, extreme weather events, questionable business deals, and a whole lot of marijuana, legal and illegal.
The Sooners endured an underwhelming start, a quarterback change, an insane comeback win over Texas, a near-loss to lowly Kansas, and another underwhelming stretch to end the year against Baylor and OSU.
There was also a lot of good news in our community in the past year. Watonga passed a school bond, and Geary is preparing to do the same. Both districts hired new leaders, as did the City of Watonga and the Watonga PD
Ḃlaine County appears headed in the right direction, just like OU football with its fiery new head coach.
Like Lincoln Riley, I'm heading for the coast. Just the opposite one. In two weeks, I'll be starting a new job in Washington, D.C., at The Daily Caller News Foundation. I'm going to miss the low cost of living and wide-open spaces of western Oklahoma. But more than anything, I'll miss the people, most of whom have been unfailingly kind and supportive and helpful to me since I arrived last year.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your warm welcome.
I hope you'll continue to follow me at my next endeavor; I'll be keeping an eye on Blaine County, for sure. Be sure to visit The Daily Caller for reporting and analysis on the national news of the day, and consider supporting The Daily Caller News Foundation as we train the next generation of impartial journalists.
I can't wait to see what happens to the Watonga community. I'm confident that, much like OU football, its brightest days are still ahead. Boomer Sooner.