Keldon Johnson doesn’t have Twitter, so when news leaked he had been added to the Team USA basketball roster for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, he had no clue his life had changed.

Spurs and Team USA head coach Gregg Popovich congratulated Johnson in the hotel lobby, and the first-round pick that spent his first professional season with the Austin Spurs in the G League was at a loss for words.

“I’m blessed and honored to be an Olympian,” Johnson said. “ I didn’t know what else to say but thank you for the opportunity to go over there and take care of business with the other guys. It’s a big opportunity for me.”

What’s happened over the last few seasons at Texas is truly in the past for first-year head coach Steve Sarkisian.

“Winning is hard,” he said at Big 12 Media Days last week.

While that sentiment is undeniably true, it’s one that the Texas fanbase had heard before. Tom Herman said the same thing after beginning the 2018 season with a loss to Maryland and a seven-point win over Tulsa.

The soccer community in Austin and Austin FC majority owner Anthony Precourt had been waiting for professional soccer to arrive ever since Precourt announced his intentions to bring a Major League Soccer team to the city in September 2017.

When Matthew McConaughey walked onto the pitch in a bright green suit with a bongo drum at Q2 Stadium on Saturday night, it finally did.

“It was an incredible experience,” Austin FC head coach Josh Wolff said. “We’ve been working a long time to get to this day. The way we’ve been taken in from this community from day one, and certainly that relationship and how it’s grown in the last six months — it’s impressive.”

Austin has always been a soccer city, but Christen Press made it official on Wednesday night.

The U.S. Women’s team forward scored the first goal in Q2 Stadium history in front of a sold-out crowd of 20,500 fans as the four-time World Cup champions broke in the $240 million stadium with a 2-0 win over Nigeria.

“It was a dream playing here,” Press said. “It’s been so long since we’ve played in a packed stadium. We missed the fans so much. It was truly special to get a match on this beautiful pitch and play in front of all our fans.”

Five years ago, the Rouse baseball program was coming off a season in which the Raiders failed to win a district game and finished the season on a 14-game losing streak.

Since then, Rouse has won two district titles, made the playoffs every year they’ve been held and is preparing to make its first-ever state tournament appearance Thursday night at Dell Diamond.

What changed before the season five years ago? Chad Krempin was hired as head coach.

There have been a lot of positive things to take from the first three games of Austin FC’s history, but one of the brightest spots has been Jared Stroud.

When he was selected by Austin FC in the expansion draft, he didn’t know much about the club and was a bit nervous, but after starts in the last two games, the 24-year-old midfielder is starting to find his groove early.

"I had high expectations for myself personally, coming into this season,” Stroud said. “It’s about not getting too high from the last two games. I have my personal goals, in terms of numbers I want to hit and chances created every game. But now, I’m approaching every game in the best way possible.”

There’s a chant that the Austin FC supporters’ groups have that reflects the moment Major League Soccer in Central Texas became a reality:

“7-4, 7-4, it was the vote, that built our home. And now we live, among the trees. Listo! Verde! Austin FC!”

That was the margin of the Austin City Council vote in August 2018 that approved what is now Q2 Stadium at McKalla Place and set into motion the final stage of the Austin FC journey that started nearly four years ago.

Austin gave so much to Kekuta Manneh when he was growing up, and he’s ready to give back.

It’s easy to say that nobody on the Austin FC roster is as tied to their new home as much as Manneh, who came to Central Texas more than a decade ago and got his American soccer career started in the youth leagues around Austin.

“To me, it was a no-brainer,” Manneh said. “It was coming back home and playing for the home-town team. Not a lot of people have the opportunity to do that.”

Nikki Cardaño-Hillary jumped in front of a pass, sprinted around a flailing defender and made the first bucket of the game for Indiana in the Hoosiers' upset win over N.C. State in the Sweet 16 on Thursday night.

From Spain to Vista Ridge High School and George Mason to Indiana, Cardaño-Hillary has had success wherever she’s been, and that continues as the Hoosiers advanced to the NCAA Elite Eight for the first time in school history this season.

“That’s no accident,” Vista Ridge girls’ basketball coach Keith Allen said. “She’s a winner. She loves the game of basketball, and she pours her heart and soul into it, so of course, she’s going to be great at it. She deserves every bit of success she’s had.”

It was hard to watch Cedar Park play or Donny Ott coach this season and not learn something about basketball.

The Timberwolves capped off an incredible season on Wednesday with a 46-39 win over Frisco Liberty to win the first state title for the girls’ basketball program, thanks in part to a coaching staff that has been building momentum over the last four years.

SAN ANTONIO — Cedar Park head coach Donny Ott fell to his knees moments before the final buzzer sounded.

Four years of hard work had built up to the ultimate prize: state champions.

Cedar Park won the state title for the first time in school history on Wednesday night, holding off a late charge from defending state champion Frisco Liberty to earn a 46-39 win to cap off an unforgettable season.

“What makes this feel so good is that I know we earned it,” Ott said.

Cedar Park senior Alisa Knight has learned a lot of basketball skills over the years from many different coaches, but her determination was inherited from the person she looks up to the most.

Annette Smith-Knight is truly a basketball legend. She is the all-time leading scorer in Texas basketball history with 2,523 points, led the Longhorns to a perfect 34-0 record and the national title in 1986 and won a gold medal with Team USA at the 1983 World University Games.

“I wish to this day I could watch her play,” Alisa said. “I always hear of all the things she did during her freshman year of college. Now, I’m the same age as she was in those videos. I want to learn from it in a way. We watch film all the time, I wish I could just watch film on my mom.”

Sarai Estupinan was in 4th grade when her older brother joined a basketball team. Naturally, her parents signed her up for the same team where she would compete against the boys.

If basketball was the sport she wanted to play, then she was going to give it her all.

“I was blessed with the ability to play basketball, and I was blessed with parents that saw my ability and didn’t let me sit on it,” Estupinan said. “They wanted me to see how far and how much I could improve on that talent.”

It was one of those days for Cedar Park defensive coordinator Steve Battles where everybody on the defensive side of the ball was having a bad practice, and it was his job to make sure they knew it.

When his son, Shelby, who plays linebacker for the Timberwolves, got home, Steve had one question for him: How was practice?

“I coach him directly and there is no buffer,” Steve Battles said. “When I’m at home, I’m your dad, and when I’m at practice, I’m a coach and I’m going to treat you like everybody else. I’ve been as objective as I can. If he did good and is up for an award, I put him up for it. If he didn’t do good, then I don’t.”

From coaches to players to the community at large, one thing has been consistent at Cedar Park for more than a decade: work ethic.

As the Timberwolves prepare to face Denton Ryan in the fourth state championship appearance in school history, the roots of their current success can be traced back more than 20 years.

“When Chris (Ross) got there, he began to build the work ethic in these guys,” Joe Willis, who won the 2012 state title as head coach of the Timberwolves, said. “That’s been the Cedar Park culture. Our defensive guys were the kind of people that would tackle you through the ground, not to the ground. They still do that to this day, there’s a determination at Cedar Park.”

Cedar Park senior Luke Williams sat in the stands at NRG Stadium in Houston in 2015 and watched as the Timberwolves won the state football title and said to himself that that could be him one day.

Five years later, it is.

A talented group of seniors that have been hearing they were special for years has the opportunity to fulfill a self-assigned expectation to go out state champions as Cedar Park takes on Denton Ryan Friday night at AT&T Stadium.

“As a little kid, you’re raised to want to play for a state championship here,” Williams said. “They told us in the seventh and eighth grade that we were going to go play for a state championship. You have to have that mentality.”

The Black Rain is still the Black Rain.

Every single time the Cedar Park defense was asked to step up this season, especially in the playoffs, the defensive unit has responded, and they’ll need to be as stout as ever as the Timberwolves go up against top-ranked Denton Ryan in the state championship on Friday night.

“It’s easy to look at our offense and all the athletes they have over there and think we’re a one-sided team, but the Black Rain is a tradition,” senior defensive back Josh Bretz said. “We’ve just gone out and done what we’ve had to do.”

Ryder Hernandez threw his first touchdown pass as a member of the Cedar Park varsity team on a trick in the late stages of a comeback win in the playoffs as a freshman.

“That’s when I knew Cedar Park was different than anywhere else,” Hernandez said.

Two seasons and many, many touchdowns later, he is quickly establishing himself as one of the best in a long line of talented and state-title-winning quarterbacks to suit up for the Timberwolves.