WELCH—The Welch High School chapter of the National Honor Society will hold a BBQ sandwich dinner in the school cafeteria, Sat., Feb. 13 from 5-7 p.m.  District basketball games begin at 6:30 p.m., so people will have the opportunity to enjoy a filling meal before rooting on the Wildcats. Dinner will include BBQ sandwich, potato salad, baked beans, dessert, and drink. The cost is $5.00 per plate, and proceeds will fund scholarships for senior National Honor Society members.

This event has been added to our Community Calendar. Send your community events to info :at: WelchOK :dot: com to have them placed on our calendar.

WELCH—It was a fun night for everyone in the Welch Wildcat Gym Tuesday night–unless you were dressed in red and white. Your Welch teams each chalked up a conference win, defeating the Fairland Lady Owls and Owls by healthy margins.

Welch Lady Cats v. Fairland Lady Owls

Fresh off a third-place finish in the NEO Tournament, your Welch Lady Cats resumed Lucky 7 Conference play last Tuesday night, hosting the Fairland Lady Owls on the Ken Sooter Court of the Welch Wildcat Gym. The Lady Cats came out ready to play and started hot with a pair of treys from Erin Snedden, racing out to a quick eight-point lead. The offense continued to click, with buckets coming the remainder of the half from all five Lady Cat starters. Sierra Hankins led the Lady Cats with 10 first-half points, and senior Erin Snedden added eight, giving the Lady Cats a 26-15 lead going into halftime. An outburst by the Fairland coach en route to the locker room earned him a technical foul and guaranteed the Lady Cats would receive the ball first to begin the second half.

The second half started with Snedden converting both technical-induced free throws. The Lady Cats added to their lead on a basket by Tylor Dodson, extending their lead to 14 with 5:30 left in the quarter. A pair of Lady Owl free throws and a made basket narrowed the gap to 11 with 4:03 left in the quarter. An “and one” by Hankins again extended the lead to 13, but she missed the charity shot. A nice up-and-under from Dodson again put the Lady Cats 13 ahead at the end of three quarters.

The fourth quarter began with a couple of touch fouls called on the Lady Cats, which led to three straight made free throws by the Lady Owls, reducing their deficit to 10 with just under seven minutes left to play. The Lady Cats started struggling on the boards until two big free throws by Megan Carpenter ran the Lady Cat lead back to 13. A pair of freebies by the visitors again cut the Lady Cat lead back to 11. The Lady Owls eventually came within nine points of Welch with 1:39 left in the game, giving Lady Cat fans a little trepidation. Tylor Dodson was fouled and made the front end of a one-and-one to push the lead back to 12 with just under 40 seconds remaining in the game. The second free shot rattled out, and Fairland secured the rebound, but the writing was already on the wall. The Lady Owls attempted a couple of long-range bombs that flew wide of the mark, and the Lady Cats chalked up a hard-earned conference victory, 52-40.

Erin Snedden led the Lady Cats with 16; Sierra Hankins and Tylor Dodson joined her in double figures with 15 and 13, respectively. Kelsie Smith and Krystin Marlow each added three, and Megan Carpenter tallied two.

Welch Wildcats v. Fairland Owls

After being named the second-place winners in the NEO Tournament round robin bracket on point differential, your Welch Wildcats returned to conference play by hosting the Fairland Owls. The Cats controlled the tip, but the Owls scored first on a nice alley-oop to one of their bigs under the basket. The Cats countered with their own big, as Jacob Mount scored on a put-back to even the score. The Owls came back to score again and got a turnover under the Welch bucket, but promptly threw it away to Joey Powers, who missed the contested layup. A bucket by Mount tied the game at six each with 3:50 left in the quarter. A bucket by Mount on the next possession put the Cats ahead 8-6. Joey Powers, usually one of the Cat’s offensive weapons, turned into the facilitator with three assists in the first quarter. Brenton Hale knocked down a long jumper for three, but Fairland answered with an immediate three of their own. Back-to-back-to-back buckets by Powers, Mount, and Powers pushed the Cat lead up to 11 just before the end of the first quarter. When the buzzer sounded, the Cats led, 20-9.

The second quarter found both defenses clamping down on the opponent’s offensive game. The Wildcats were held to just seven points for the quarter, while the visitors managed only eight of their own. The Cats went into the half with a 27-17 lead. Jacob Mount led the Cats with 13 points the first half.

Powers started the second half with a bang, scoring six straight points and extending the Cat lead to 16. A bucket by Mount, assisted by Jordan Dry, fell right before a trey by Chance Harris extended the lead to 20 with 2:50 left in the third quarter. A Powers put-back pushed the Cat lead 22 with under ten seconds left in the third.

The fourth quarter started with Fairland in possession of the ball, and they scored quickly, cutting their deficit 20. A missed trey by Powers led to a Fairland basket in transition, again narrowing the Cats’ substantial lead. Fairland began to rally and gain momentum, but Gabe Moore drew a charging foul to get the ball back into Cat hands, and then he was fouled on the other end attempting a put-back off an offensive rebound. He made one of two foul shots, making the score 48-29 with 4:40 left in the game. Jacob Mount was fouled shooting on the next possession with 3:46 left. He knocked down both free shots to expand the Cat lead back to 21. The Wildcats ran their keep away game the last of the quarter and exhausted the clock with a 54-39 victory.

Jacob Mount led the Cats with 19; Joey Powers joined him in double figures with 16. Brenton Hale added six, Gabe Moore tallied four, Chance Harris had three, and Jordan Dry and Grant Bullard contributed two each.

Click here to see our Flickr photo set for this game.

Patrick Hankins contributed to this report. You, too, can be a WelchOK.com contributor. Email your news, info, and pics to info ‹at› WelchOK ‹dot› com.

WELCH—We braved the icy roads to file this video report.

From the Redneck Diva:

My dish this week is later than usual (and by “usual” I mean I’ve done it twice so far and both on different days of the week so, yeah, whatever) because I’ve been caught up in the hype that is the great state of Oklahoma in a great state of panic: the few days prior to an impending ice storm. I, personally, have called it “Icepocalypse” all week, others have called it “Snowmageddon” and the Weather Channel has called it the “Southern Plains Triple Threat”—all very cool names, in my opinion. What is it about a major weather event that causes us to feel that we need to give it a name? Does it somehow make it more real to us? Does it make it easier to prepare for the mayhem that is to follow? Maybe it’s the fact that virtually everyone on the planet is involved in some sort of social media, and we give things names to ease communication. Like this: You’re chatting along in a chat room (do they even have those anymore?) or you’re popping out tweets to your Twitter feed every three minutes, and you start talking about the weather and no one pays the least bit of attention to you. But give the weather a cool name like THE GREAT ICE STORM OF IMPENDING DOOM, DEATH, DESPAIR AND WIDESPREAD DESTRUCTION (TGISIDDDWD, for short) and suddenly you are a weather icon of epic proportions and people all over the country are sending out prayers and donating to your local Red Cross chapter and lighting candles and creating Facebook groups (“I survived TGISIDDDWD 2010!”) and creating t-shirt logos and, well, you get the picture.

I love all things weather, and I always have. Friends and family member call me when they need a weather forecast or update because they know I’ve been geeking out in front of The Weather Channel all day long. Spring- and summer-time storms are my favorites, but I’m not opposed to a little winter excitement, either. Back in the days before Doppler radar and fancy satellite imagery, weather forecasting consisted of fuzzy views of a radar map with that little arm sweeping around to refresh the image every so often. It was all we had and I, for one, was mesmerized by it. There were no text messages from NOAA, but my Papa did have a weather radio that invariably scared the snot out of me when it would start chirping. We weren’t informed nearly a week ahead of time that something was headed our way. We got about four hours’ notice, sometimes less. There was no Twitter or Facebook on which to proclaim the precipitation of the hour. Yesterday I had to empty the text message inbox on my phone three times because of all the Twitter updates I was getting from Oklahoma City and Tulsa folks who were keeping those of us up north informed of what was to come. When I was a kid we didn’t run to the cellar a good hour before the tornado was bearing down on us—Mom drove the Nova at a high rate of speed to Papa’s cellar while we girls kept an eye on the twister in the rearview mirror. Of course, when I was a kid they also didn’t forecast an ice storm of “probable historic proportions” only to have it fizzle out to a minor snow event. Back then, they would have been patting themselves on the back to have gotten the snow in the forecast. My, how times have changed.

If the storm that is upon us now had happened when I was a kid we wouldn’t have known a full seven days out that Something Wintry This Way Comes. We wouldn’t have made four trips to Walmart in two days to pick up inordinate amounts of toilet paper and an unreasonable quantity of bread. We wouldn’t have gone through every closet in the house to dig out every flashlight and lantern for a bulb and battery check and have to announce to our youngest child that indeed, the Tinker Bell lantern is dead for good and must be thrown away, and yes, we’ll get a new one at Disney World, I promise. We wouldn’t have done so much laundry that the washing machine sighs every time we open the lid and we wouldn’t have the children strip when they walk in the door from school so we could do just one more load before we lose power and water and the drains freeze up until April. We wouldn’t have lugged ten bags of pellets for the stove and a 40-pound bag of dog food into our bedroom so we could walk around them for however long it’s going to take to burn up ten bags of pellets. (My guess, April when the pipes thaw.) No, we’d have met the storm with very little planning aforethought. We would have been caught unprepared, eating sandwiches on the crushed bread Mom dug out of the freezer (which was probably there since the Carter administration) by the light of mulberry-scented Home Interior votives Mom bought at the neighbors’ party last June, pulling mattresses into the living room so we could sleep by the fireplace, forced to snuggle with our annoying 12-year-old sister because it is so cold we can see our breath if we move more than six feet from the fire, listening to Dad grumble about this and Mom worry and fuss about that—whoa! Pardon my flashback to 1988. And that gigantic run-on sentence.

Today I am thankful, yet somewhat disappointed, that the weather hasn’t lived up to the expectations of a storm worthy of ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and a Facebook page all its own. I love the quiet that comes with a winter storm—like the world has been encased in a sound-muffling layer of Styrofoam and everything takes on a clarity you don’t find any other time. No, I wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of losing power like we did in 2007, eating grilled cheese sandwiches cooked in the dark on a griddle perched on a dining room chair in my bedroom because that’s as far as the extension cord from the generator would reach. Or the sound of the trees on our property cracking and breaking and crashing to the ground. Or going more days than allowable with a shower. Or being cut off from the Internet and satellite TV. But I was looking forward to reading a book by the light of the bay window until the sun goes down, then playing board games by candlelight, snuggling with my kiddos, and maybe even writing a story, blog post, or column by hand (although I’m sure my hand muscles would’ve begun screaming almost immediately) [Editor's note: And your editor certainly wouldn't be thrilled about transcribing your hand-written column]. I do love my computer, iPod, and cell phone, but sometimes being cut off from conveniences makes us to slow down and concentrate on our immediate surroundings and focus on what is right in front of us. It’s something we could do on our own, but we won’t until we’re forced. Instead of reading 300-some Twitter updates about everyone else’s winter weather experiences, we are suddenly immersed in our own.

The snow still continues to fall here in northeastern Oklahoma, and our satellite Internet and TV are in and out. There’s still a chance we’ll be forced to an electronic stand-still and this momma is hopeful. Then maybe someday one of my children will write about how we played Jenga on the living room floor and laughed until we cried when Daddy got frustrated and called the blocks a bad name. Or how Momma read Where the Wild Things Are and on the pages with no words made up dialogue and gave each Wild Thing a different voice. Or maybe they’ll just remember watching it snow, sitting by the window with their siblings, and for once not pushing, shoving or pinching, but instead just enjoying.

Diva

Kristin Hoover is the Redneck Diva. A local blogger and stay-at-home mom, Kristin has won Okie Blog Awards for her humorous take on the rural life of a natural-born diva who married a redneck and produced three offspring. Visit her blog at http://www.theredneckdiva.com.

WELCH—The weather doesn’t seem to be as severe as was predicted by those calling for an icepocalypse, but we did get a cover of sleet/ice last night. It turned to snow this morning, and it has been falling at a good clip all day. Here’s an on-the-spot report.

WELCH—With another round of severe winter weather headed for Welch, the Town of Welch today announced that if the storms result in power outages, the Civic Center will be operating as a shelter under emergency generator power. If it becomes necessary to take shelter in the Civic Center, and you need transportation, call the Town Hall at 918-788-3616. Leave a voice mail if you do not reach a live person. All messages will be monitored.

At present, the National Weather Service says:

* RAIN WILL TRANSITION TO FREEZING RAIN…SLEET AND EVENTUALLY
SNOW BEGINNING THURSDAY MORNING AND CONTINUING THROUGH FRIDAY
MORNING. THE HEAVIEST PRECIPITATION IS EXPECTED LATE THURSDAY
THROUGH EARLY FRIDAY.

* 6 TO 10 INCHES OF SNOW AND SLEET ACCUMULATION ARE EXPECTED TO
THE NORTHWEST OF INTERSTATE 44 WITH ISOLATED AMOUNTS NEAR 12
INCHES POSSIBLE IN NORTHERN OSAGE COUNTY. ICE ACCUMULATIONS OF
ONE QUARTER TO THREE QUARTERS OF AN INCH ARE POSSIBLE SOUTH OF
THE HEAVY SLEET AND SNOW AREA…WITH THE HEAVIEST ICE
ACCUMULATIONS NEAR A LINE FROM OKEMAH TO FAYETTEVILLE.

Make necessary preparations now.

WELCH—We asked both of the candidates for Welch’s board of education—Steve Harris and Brian Mooney—if they’d be willing to answer a few questions, and they both agreed. Then we opened it up to WelchOK.com readers and asked you to submit questions you’d like the candidates to answer. After receiving questions via email and adding some of our own, we transmitted a list of 20 questions (plus one extra credit query) to the candidates at the precise same time. They each received the exact same questions, and they both had the exact same amount of time to respond to the questions, which they have now done. So, we’re happy to be able to share with you their responses as we play 20 Questions with the Candidates.

Keep in mind that the responses presented below are exactly as they were submitted. We made it clear to both candidates that their responses would appear on the site exactly as they submitted them, and that we would not edit for typos, spelling, and/or grammar. Both candidates submitted their answers electronically, and what appears here are a direct copy-paste of their submissions.

Seeing both candidates’ responses, we’re satisfied with some, disappointed with some, and would like to ask follow-ups to others. Now’s your chance to see what you think. We hope this exercise lets you know a bit more about the candidates and helps you determine how you should best cast your vote Feb. 9, two weeks from today. We encourage you to click the “Print this Post” link below and print copies to share with your friends and neighbors who aren’t online. We think it will benefit them, too.

For the record, WelchOK.com is endorsing neither candidate. We appreciate both candidates’ willingness to serve.

20 Questions with the Candidates

KOTV’s Travis Meyer says up to an inch of ice and maybe a foot of snow. Make your preparations now.

If it works (KOTV videos seem to just stop working from time to time), here’s the video forecast.

WELCH—The NEO Clinic located on Welch’s main street is now open Monday-Thursday each week. Dr. E.W. Allensworth, MD, and Bill Evans, PA, will be available according to the schedule below. Services available at the clinic are drawing labs, minor surgical procedures, exams, physicals (including DOT), injections, and most routine doctor’s office items. Additionally, Bill Evans, PA, will provide housecalls for those unable to make it to the clinic.

Clinic information is as follows:

343 S. Commercial St.
Welch, OK 74369
P: 918-788-3918
F: 918-788-3914

Hours:

• Monday: 8:30 a.m.-noon, Bill Evans, PA
• Tuesday: 8:30 a.m.-noon, Bill Evans, PA
• Wednesday: 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Bill Evans, PA, & E.W. Allensworth, MD
• Thursdays: 8:30 a.m.-noon, Bill Evans, PA

Junior Sooner Xplosion cloggers at Welch's Harvest Day 2009

WELCH—The junior Sooner Xplosion clogging team will have a benefit spaghetti lunch, Sun., Jan. 31, at the Welch Civic Center. Serving will begin at 11:30 a.m. For a cost of $6.00, lunch includes spaghetti, salad, bread, dessert, and drink. There will also be door prizes, a dessert auction, and the clogging team will perform for your enjoyment. The team is planning on four competitions this year, and funds raised will be used for costumes, entry fees, and travel expenses. Be at the Civic Center Sunday afternoon if you wish to help support the team.

This event has been added to our Community Calendar. Send your events to info [at] WelchOK [dot] com to have them included on our calendar.