The Nation's Largest Basketball Gym Chain Coming to the Fort Worth Area

ROANOKE, Texas, June 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- PickUp USA Fitness – www.pickupusafitness.com – headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, announced today the opening of their newest location in Roanoke, TX. This will be the second PickUp USA location in DFW, along with their gym in Coppell.

PickUp USA gyms offer basketball-focused services for youth and adults. Their youth services include private basketball training, group basketball skills training, and youth basketball development leagues. For adults, PickUp USA offers full weight rooms as well as PickUp basketball with referees.

Founded in 2012 in Los Angeles, the company is now the largest and fastest-growing basketball gym chain in the country.

The new PickUp USA in Roanoke is described as a showcase location for the brand with three full basketball courts and a state-of-the-art fitness room.

Jarrod Green is the owner of the new PickUp USA, and has been involved with basketball for over a decade. "I've always had a love for basketball," says Green. "My kids play, and I've been coaching AAU for 13 years."

Green sees a substantial demand for his gym's services. "The Fort Worth market is heavy into youth development," says Green, "and in a 20-mile radius there are probably only three or four gyms that can even offer a court. Basketball brings people together and it teaches kids discipline. I'm really excited to open up."

In the early years of the company, PickUp USA catered exclusively to adults with a single service offering of PickUp basketball with referees. The brand became known as a premier destination for PickUp basketball.

As the company grew, they started offering youth services focused on basketball development. PickUp USA's youth basketball development leagues are now widely considered the most comprehensive program of their kind in the country. "We've worked for years to get our youth programming on the same level as our adult programming," says Paolo Ontalan, PickUp USA's Vice President of Operations. "We'll always refine and improve our services, but we feel confident we are delivering an A+ youth development league in the communities we serve."

The new Roanoke PickUp started pre-selling memberships earlier this month and is set to open in the early Summer. More information on PickUp can be found at .

DALLAS (NewsNation) — Nearly 40 million Americans are under winter weather alerts across the country as severe cold and winter storms make their way through the South, killing at least one person in Texas.

More than 1,700 flights nationwide have been canceled. Traffic has been brought to a standstill on an interstate through Arkansas. And crashes have increased, including one that seriously injured two Texas law officers.

A significant ice storm continued across Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee Tuesday, leaving cities covered in ice. Additional ice amounts are still expected over the next 36 hours, which will mean more major impacts on roads and airports.

Numerous auto collisions were reported in Austin, Texas, with at least one fatality according to the Austin Fire Department.

More than 900 flights to or from major U.S. airport hub Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and more than 250 to or from Dallas Love Field were canceled or delayed Tuesday, according to the tracking service FlightAware. At Dallas-Fort Worth, more than 50% of Tuesday’s scheduled flights had been canceled by Tuesday afternoon.

The storm began Monday as part of an expected “several rounds” of wintry precipitation through Wednesday across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Marc Chenard.

More than 1,000 flights were canceled and many more were delayed Monday as the states dealt with freezing temperatures and wintry precipitation.

Travel has been highly impacted across the Dallas-Fort Worth area and is expected to worsen.

Monday’s disruptions follow Southwest’s meltdown in December that began with a winter storm but continued after most other airlines had recovered. Southwest canceled about 16,700 flights over the last 10 days of the year, and the U.S. Transportation Department is investigating.

NewsNation’s meteorologist Gerard Jebaily said that the series of storms moving through the South will head toward the Northeast through Thursday.

Power outages are expected to remain moderate, as a good portion of the ice is in the form of sleet, which won’t stick to lines and trees, Jebaily said.

Beyond Texas, forecasters said ice could accumulate in neighboring Oklahoma and Arkansas and stretch east into the Deep South and Midwest this week. Schools and colleges in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas planned to close or go to virtual learning Tuesday.

A separate storm is expected to bring mountain snow and valley rain to the interior Southwest. Chilly air will promote snow showers around the Great Lakes.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Smiley’s Craft Barbecue in Roanoke is closed permanently, says owner and pitmaster Brendan Lamb.

The restaurant last served its brisket, sausage and other Central Texas style barbecue in mid-September 2021. Lamb confirmed in late November that the restaurant won’t reopen.

After operating as a pop-up in Fort Worth and Ponder, Smiley’s opened in Roanoke in early 2019 to lines out the door. When the pandemic hit, sales fell. By 2021, Lamb appeared on a high-profile food network show called BBQ Brawl featuring chefs Bobby Flay, Michael Symon and Eddie Jackson. Surely, that kind of national attention could give Smiley’s a boost, right?

“We did enough to pay for meat each week and pay our employees, but we were left with nothing,” Lamb says.

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“And then the meat prices went up.” It’s a common refrain among pitmasters across the country: They’re struggling under inflated costs of meat, with some restaurants charging customers up to $30 a pound for prime brisket.

Lamb says he wanted to get more creative with Smiley’s menu, but he had to be careful not to make dishes already served by other tenants at Oak Street Food & Brew. He had to stay away from burgers or tacos, for instance, because other businesses at the food hall already sold those.

Lamb was locked out in September 2021 for failure to pay rent.

“We rode it into the ground,” he says. “We kept on thinking it would get better.”

For now, Lamb is consulting for other barbecue joints. He plans to host backyard events teaching barbecue techniques with a company called BBQxo, and he’ll make a return in 2022 at For the Love of Barbecue, a festival in Roanoke.

Smiley’s Craft Barbecue was at 206 N. Oak St., Roanoke. It closed in mid-September 2021.

Star Stagecoach Route on Roanoke Road

Sometimes the backroads hide pieces of history, tucked away from the roads more often traveled. The ‘scenic route’ my dad would call it, reminiscent of all the Sunday afternoon drives we had when I was a youngster.

Roanoke Road doesn’t run for too long of a stretch.

Walnut Street in Roanoke, Texas turns into Roanoke Road as you head south, right before you cross 170 into Westlake, and it ends at Mt. Gilead. I hadn’t gone this way too often, preferring the busier and more efficient 377. That is, more efficient on the days you don’t catch the red-light sequence at the wrong time. But recently we had a string of appointments in Keller and decided to go this back route simply to enjoy the beauty of the land and relish the slower pace.

You won’t travel quickly on Roanoke Road, as most of the way the speed limit is 30 mph. There are a few twists and dips up and down. I wouldn’t recommend this road on an icy day. Recently, after traversing this route several times, I discovered something new.

A stagecoach used to travel this route.

From 1854-1859, a weekly stagecoach star route delivered mail. It followed a path from Alton to Birdville and much of this route became Roanoke Road many years later.

Alton and Birdville were the two county seats at that time. They were later replaced by Denton and Fort Worth.

At the beginning of the Civil War there were thirty-one stagecoach lines operating in Texas, delivering passengers and mail. After the Civil War, hundreds of mail contacts for Texas routes were let.

The star routes began in 1845 to reduce mail transportation costs. Congress adopted an Act on March 3, 1845, abandoning its preference for stagecoaches. Future contracts were to be awarded to the lowest bidder for what “may be necessary to provide for the due celerity, certainty and security of such transportation.” These bids became know as “celerity, certainty and security” bids, which postal clerks shortened to ‘three asterisks or stars (***). The bids were soon known as star bids and the routes became known as star routes.

It seems odd that even back that many years ago, government agencies were concerned with cutting costs as much as in today’s world. In 1845, more the two-thirds of the Post Office Departments budget was allocated for transportation. By 1849, the Department cut transportation costs on all routes – horseback, stage, steamboat, and railroad. The budget was trimmed by 17%, even despite the route distances increasing by 20%. The star routes played a huge factor in these savings, cutting per-miles costs from 7.2 cents to 4.5 cents.

One of these Star Routes ran right through this area. Take a drive south on Roanoke Road, to Thornton Drive in Westlake. You can see the historical marker that is the only remnant left of this piece of history from 150 years ago. The drivers in those days weren’t even traveling the 30-mph that seem so slow and pokey to us now.

According to the marker, mules pulled the stagecoaches in this area. The roads were unimproved, so mules were better able to navigate the terrain. And they were safer as they were less desirable to the Indians in the area.

It makes our nice slow peaceful drive of today seem pretty easy and carefree now, doesn’t it?

Roanoke Hard Eight BBQ owed $867,572 in tips and pay for 910 workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

ROANOKE, Texas — A Texas employer failed to pay its employees nearly $900,000 in tips and overtime pay, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.

The North Texas restaurant Roanoke Hard Eight BBQ owed its employees all their tips and hourly managers weren’t paid the correct time and a half rate for all hours worked over 40 hours in a workweek. This came out to $867,572 in owed tips and pay for 910 workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The Fair Labor Standards Act does not allow an employer or their managers or supervisors to keep tips the business’ workers receive for any purposes, regardless of whether or not the employer claims a tip credit.

Roanoke Hard Eight broke the law by including managers in their tip pool, according to Dallas' Wage and Hour District Director Jesus A. Valdez.

"By doing so, the employer denied tipped workers some of their tips and managers proper overtime wages,” Valdez said. “As businesses struggle to find people to do the work needed to keep operating, employers would be wise to avoid violations or risk finding it even more difficult to retain and recruit workers who can choose to seek jobs where they will receive all of their rightful wages.”

The Department of Labor said its audit recovered those funds after launching the investigation.

Chad Decker is co-owner of Hard Eight BBQ. He shared with WFAA why he got into the restaurant business years ago.

"I have the joy of the people service industry. I've always been a people person. Our families always enjoyed cooking and getting around and have a family setting, and so we started our first restaurant in Stephenville, Texas in 2003," Decker said. "And it's just grown. We've been blessed to be where we're at because it's grown so much. We are such a family and such a family-oriented place to come and dine."

Decker said the restaurant got into hot water by adding managers to their tip share program, which has been against state regulations since 2018. He wants their customers to know now, that every single tip goes to Hard Eight BBQ employees.

"Immediately when we received notification from labor force, immediately we changed our protocol and how the tip shares were distributed," said Decker.

The Department of Labor confirmed that Hard Eight BBQ is in 100% compliance after paying the back wages and tips to their employees, something the restaurant owners want their customers to know.