TitleTown, USA

If you watch ESPN's SportsCenter at 6 p.m. tonight, you'll see Valdosta being handed the title of TitleTown, USA. Having lived there for a couple years in the early ’90s, I can vouch for the championship atmosphere of the town. With Wild Adventures and family still there, including a second cousin who is a senior quarterback for the Valdosta High Wildcats, the winningest high school football team in the nation, I still get there fairly often.

Though I worked for an incredibly stingy newspaper company at the time, I enjoyed living there, and if I could have survived economically, I would have stayed. They sold all their U.S. papers after I left, but the top-tier newspaper companies surprisingly let the Valdosta Daily Times slip through their fingers. It's a great town and, yet, every time I go back I'm stunned by how nice everyone is there from the strangers on the street to all the waitresses with the sugary-sweet Southern drawls.

And if you've never been to a Valdosta High School or Lowndes High football game, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Congrats to all those folks in my old stomping grounds.