While much of the focus for the season was on the boys team, the Idalou girls basketball squad quietly put together a season that was just as impressive, coming just a handful of points from reaching the state tournament. Thiel was the leader, averaging 12.3 points, 3.9 steals and 3.0 rebounds per game. Don’t look now, but the Lady Cats have asserted themselves as just as much a power in the 2A ranks as the boys team has, and Johnson deserves a lot of credit for guiding Idalou to not only the district title but a berth in the regional final.

Perhaps the most athletic player on the All-City team, Wilson was the catalyst for the Lady Matadors’ resurgence that ended just shy of the postseason thanks to a playoff-for-seeding loss to Levelland. The Lady Pirates opened as one of the top teams in the state in the preseason polls, and though they had a couple of minor stumbles, there they were at the end of the season as the area’s last Class 3A team remaining. Hilliard continues to retool his team despite who returns and who graduates.

For one of the few times, the Player of the Year is a shared honor. Then again, it was hard for opposing teams to stop both Dimba sisters at the same time. Not only do they look the same, they play the same. Lizzy averaged 11.9 points and 5.2 rebounds per game while Suzzy averaged 10.3 points and 5.4 rebounds in leading the Lady Mustangs to the Region I-5A championship game.

There was a time, as hard as it may be to believe, that Lizzy and Suzzy Dimba were not very good on a basketball court. In fact, the twins were actually on a path to become outstanding soccer players like their father, even though they’d played both sports all through Lubbock Girls Basketball and AAU. But they both admitted recently that in AAU, they were so bad that no one really wanted to pass them the ball. “There was this one game where we showed up and were surprised how well we did,” Suzzy Dimba said. ‘We realized then that we were actually kind of good.”