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(Editor's Note: Troy O'Hair is best known by many Alvans from his role as principal at Alva Junior High School. This story first appeared in the Oklahoman and is reprinted by permission.) EDMOND, Okla. – Terri Ritterhouse has tried to explain to her dad why she isn't coming inside his assisted living center, why she is only visiting him these days through the window. She has assured him it's not because she is ill. "I'm not sick," she had told him, "but the world is, and so we have to be very, v...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Tommy Noble hates sitting still. He's a construction man who regularly wakes at 5 a.m. and heads to a site, hops on a tractor and gets dirty. But as much as he prefers busy days to lazy ones, this summer has tested him. "It's a good thing I don't have hair," he said, laughing about his shaved-bald head. Noble heads up construction for Fields & Futures, the nonprofit rebuilding athletic fields in Oklahoma City Public Schools. Over the past six years, he has overseen the completion of 22 fields. Three or four a year. This s...
Former Alva High School football coach Dan Cocannouer has been retired about six months and he already knows it doesn’t work for him. So, the longtime football coach is making a comeback to the high school level, this time as the athletic director. Cocannouer is the new Capitol Hill High School athletic director, he and Oklahoma City Public Schools athletic director Keith Sinor confirmed to The Oklahoman on Tuesday. Cocannouer spent the past nine seasons as the head football coach at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, his alma mater. B...
DEL CITY, Okla. (AP) — Angie Wages occasionally tells her students the story about her brother's first baseball team. Their family had just moved from Iowa to Oklahoma, and her brother wanted to play for a certain third-grade team. He'd never played organized ball, but he'd grown up around the game. The team didn't want him. Wages remembers her brother being upset but undeterred. He convinced their dad to start a team. Things turned out well for A.J. Hinch. He went on to become the National Gatorade Player of the Year in 1992 while at M...
KINGFISHER, Okla. (AP) — The fight song starts up, and so do a couple dozen girls in the blue and gold of Kingfisher High. Arms extend. Hands clap. Legs kick. Bodies spin. Cora Beth Taylor knows every move by heart, but she only does some. The claps. The arms. The rest is too risky for the spunky blonde. She has cerebral palsy. When the other girls on the cheer squad kick, she smiles. When they spin, she smiles. "It may be different," Cora Beth says, "but I'm doing it." The Oklahoman reports that Kingfisher is a football town, and even t...
EDMOND, Okla. (AP) — Wearing a fluorescent orange shirt that rivaled the vibrancy of the pink cast on his left arm, Kaden Twyman marched to the plate with a bat held only in his right hand. After watching a couple pitches and missing a couple more, the 9-year-old clubbed the ball across the infield. Boys in blue shirts and white pants and red shoes and blue hats and black shorts and red hats scrambled after it. All the while, no coaches screamed from the dugouts, no umpires worked the bases, no parents signaled from the coaching boxes. Truth i...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Keri Young locked eyes with her husband as they stood amid the starting line chaos of the kids' marathon with their 2-year-old. "I'm probably going to cry through the whole thing," she said. He nodded knowingly. "I haven't cried for 48 hours," she said. "I'm due." When the family decided months ago to do the kids' event at the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, the plan involved a fourth family member. Keri was pregnant and still would be on race day, so she and husband, Royce, wanted their hometown race to be their first w...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The black-and-white photo of Dick Soergel popped onto the screen, a football raised above his blond head of hair, a pose struck for the high school yearbook six decades ago. He chuckled at the image. So did Russell Perry. "Oh, Dick," Perry said to his friend. But a few minutes later, it was Perry's turn to see a high school version of himself on the screen. The photo captured him midair, a football cocked behind his black head of hair. Now grey of hair and slow of step, both men smiled as they sat beside each other in a s...
