AHMO is a big deal in Wylie - it's on the team's jerseys, you'll see it on car windows, and on shops in downtown Wylie. But the question always comes up (from me too) ... what does it mean?

We talked to the man who brought AHMO to Wylie: former head football coach Jerry Shaffer. He told us where and how it originated, and I'll just copy the quotation here so I don't leave out parts of the story (which I'm forced to do TV story because of time constraints):

"We're getting ready to play the regional game in 1977, against the #1 ranked team in the state, Breckenridge. They scored about 50 points per game, and we didn't have much business playing them. I happened to watch a show on television, like on Sunday night, the Dean Martin celebrtiy roast, and one of the comedians used the expression that night - AHMO ... as in, AHMO kick your butt. And that resonated with me for some reason, and I thought well, the next afternoon in practice, we'll just break our huddle and instead of saying ready "break," we'll say ready, "Ahmo" and sort of, anything to encourage us to be more aggressive against the kind of opposition we were facing.

"Well as it turned out we did win the game, in a rather miraculous manner. One second left in the game, we threw a 30-yard touchdown pass and won the game 12-10. And when we got back to our locker room, all the cars are painted with AHMO and subsequently we won the state championship and returned to the state finals next year and all that added together engraved that in everybody's brain."

It's interesting to think that had Wylie lost that regional game to Breckenridge, AHMO probably would have died on the vine. Instead, 31 years later, it's still the battle cry for a program on the verge of its second state championship.

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