Last Saturday at the Regional Cross Country meet in Waurika, the Ryan Cowgirls made history by winning their first Regional Team Championship.  The team is comprised of Katelyn Dabbs, Grace Stamper, Alicen Williams, Lily York, Juliet Spangler, Whittany Spangler and Lilybet Harmon.  These young ladies have achieved so many first time accomplishments that I could probably fill the entire page of the paper, so I will just hit the highlights.  Besides the team championship, Lilybet Harmon had the best individual finish in school history with a 5th place finish and a time of 13:13.  It is also the first time that Ryan has had two girls on the medal stand in the same regional.  The Cowgirls have won 6 meets this year.  From here the young ladies go on to State.  It is worth mentioning that Ryan had only one Cowboy running at Regional and although he did not qualify for State, he did run his best time of the year.  Mason Adsit is young and it will be interesting to see how far he and the Cowgirls go in the future.  Congratulations to you all.

     Ryan Future Farmers of America will be walking on to the stage in Indianapolis, Indiana to receive the National Three star Chapter Award.  The three things that it takes to win this award are community work, agricultural work and building leaders.

     So far I have written about students accomplishments in sports and FFA, but I have to think that the qualities they are learning will make them the leaders of the future, be it at the local level or beyond.  It is a pleasure to see young people do big things.

     The ag boosters will be selling “Boo Bags” this week, if you are interested, contact any of them.(I had to ask what a boo bag is.)

     The Baptist Church is going to be working this coming Sunday doing clean up work around town as mission work.  They will be working all day and if anyone wants to help you can contact any of the Baptists or I am sure it would be okay to just show up.

     Books have played an important roll in my life.  From Dr. Seuss as a small child to the books I started checking out of the school library here at Ryan in the 7th grade.  I read whatever was available and I must have seemed like an odd kid to Clifford Peacocks parents, he would be playing with toys and I would be reading.  The first book that I remember checking out was a book about the racehorse, Man of War.  The horse was sold as a yearling for $5000 and became one of the biggest sports figures of the time.  At home I would read World Book Encyclopedias, novels or The Readers Digest.  As an adult, I discovered bookstores.  There was one in the mall in Duncan that was owned by an older gentleman and it was there that I discovered Robert Service, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.  Then when Hastings came to town, I thought that I had hit the mother lode.  I made many discoveries among the shelves and if you could not find it there then they would order it for you.  Waurika has a pretty good library and has always proven to be helpful in finding what you might want.