The Lancaster High School boys basketball team won the Division 5A state championship -- the first championship win ever for the school.
Everything came together for the team and the coaches -- and one relationship in particular inspired them all: the bond between Head Coach Ferrin Douglas and Assistant Coach Autry Bostick.
They're like father and son, and they go way back -- back to when Douglas was on the freshman basketball team at Dallas' Adamson High School and Bostick was the head coach.
They bonded, Douglas grew up, and the two remained friends.
The story of what brought them to together again will go down in Lancaster history.
Last summer, Bostick was an eight-year-retiree, living in South Carolina.
And Douglas had a coaching vacancy and a powerhouse team hungry to win the championship.
“I said, let me see if I can talk Coach Bostick into moving from South Carolina back to Dallas to coach,” Douglas said. And Bostick didn’t need much convincing.
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"When he told me I could help him win some basketball games, I wanted to do it,” Bostick said. A couple of weeks later, Bostick drove all the way from South Carolina to meet the staff and tour the school.
And Lancaster was poised to win it all.
"I don't think he really understood how good we were,” said Coach Douglas. "He thought he was coming down to try to help us win the playoffs, but he didn't know we had a really national-type team.”
Players say the bond between Bostick and Douglas helped make the entire team more cohesive.
"The lasting bond has to do with both of us being able to trust one another,” Bostick said. “He cares for me, I care for him.”
In the finals, Lancaster held a mostly double-digit lead, winning the UIL State Class 5A Championship.
And for Bostick, who also had never won a championship, the comeback was huge.
“I thought it was over for me and I was able to get it, so that's great,” Bostick said. “But still it's for him, for the boys and for the community. That’s greater than me getting it.”
