BRANDON TAYLOR

Making the program's first appearance in the state baseball tournament since 2005, Smithson Valley fell behind early and was unable to mount a late comeback in a loss to Rockwall Heath in the Class 6A semifinals on Friday night.

After defeating Los Fresnos in a one-game, winner-take-all Regional Final on Friday, the Smithson Valley baseball hit the practice field on Monday to prepare for the program's first berth in the UIL Class 6A State tournament since 2005.

The Smithson Valley baseball team was shown a lot of love by their hometown community, as they officially left on a chartered bus headed for Corpus Christi to take on Los Fresnos in a one-game Regional Final playoff on Thursday at 4 p.m.

LONDON – Scottish writer Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for fiction Thursday for “Shuggie Bain,” the story of a boy’s turbulent coming of age in hardscrabble 1980s Glasgow. Stuart, 44, won the prestigious 50,000 pound ($66,000) award for his first published novel, the product of a decade of work. Stuart dedicated the book to own mother, who died when he was 16. Though there have been many British winners of the Booker Prize, most of them English, Stuart is the first Scottish victor since James Kelman took the 1994 prize with “How Late it Was, How Late” — a book Stuart has called an inspiration. Mantel won the Booker for both its predecessors, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies,” and had been widely tipped for the hat trick.