For the first time in its over 90 year history, the UIL Boys and Girls State Basketball Championships will be played outside of the University of Texas campus.  The event had been held at old Gregory Gym or the Frank Erwin Center since 1921.  The 2015 championships will be held at the Alamodome in San Antonio which can accommodate a huge crowd.  The basketball tournament is being displaced from Austin because of the success of the over-lapping South by Southwest music festival.  Hotel rooms in Austin have become very expensive during the festival forcing some teams to stay at hotels as much as an hour away from Austin.

An anecdote for those who remember the old Gregory Gym days.

In 1977, Red and his brother wanted to attend the Thursday session at Gregory Gym.  The venerable field house seated about 5500 fans and would be packed for the 4A semifinal games that morning.  All seating was general admission.  When we got to the gym, there were already at least two or three thousand people waiting on the broad steps and all the way out to Speedway.  The steps to the gym had large 3 foot wide stone bannisters running up each side.  We parked ourselves at the bottom of one of the bannisters waiting for the doors to open.  At the precise moment the crowd started to rumble with the opening of the doors, we charged up the bannisters around the crowd on the steps and plunged into the throng in front of the doors.  Red caught a jet stream that carried him to door with the first entrants. Smashing my ticket into the hands of the attendant, I joined the mad rush across the court to grab a front row seat at the top of the key.  My brother found me within seconds.

We watched Fort Worth Dunbar beat Houston Westchester and Dallas South Oak Cliff defeat San Antonio Burbank.  Cletus Hubbard from Dunbar had a sweet fade-away jumper that simply refused to miss that day.  But SO-C took them down in the finals on Saturday.