The meeting will focus on and discuss various scenarios involving the police and will ask the community for feedback on those interactions. Saturday's meeting is one of the latest virtual gatherings in a series of about a dozen conversations over the last four months.

Donovan Williams has played through pain almost his entire basketball career. The sophomore guard’s left knee issues first began during his junior year of high school. But Williams played through the first injury. And then he played through his second knee injury during his senior year.  “Going all the way back into March and even back into last season, I just wasn’t 100%,” Williams said.  He even played through an injury during warmups for a Feb. 29 game in Lubbock before he reached his breaking point during halftime, head coach Shaka Smart said. “He missed a dunk in the first half of that game, and I thought he hurt it then,” Smart said. “But he had already hurt it, actually in warmups … At halftime, he didn’t lace up and just said he’s not going to be able to go.” It’s been a long journey back for Williams, who had just begun to receive heavy minutes as a freshman before his season was cut short. He had surgery on March 11 to implant four screws in his kneecap. But, Williams said, the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed him valuable time to recover. He became an internet student of the game, focusing on growing his basketball IQ and watching Kobe Bryant videos and YouTube highlights.  “It gave me time to rest, heal up and really get myself into a position where I can be 100% healthy and in a better position to help the team,” Williams said. “The mental game is what I developed the most during the pandemic. … I wanted to grow my IQ so on the off chance that I don’t get back to being as athletic as I was in the past, I can still make a contribution.” During a normal year, Williams said he would have had to rush his recovery. Even with the postponed start to the season, the guard wasn’t fully cleared for live play as Texas started practice. In those practices, Williams had to get used to wearing a cumbersome brace. But he continued to push through the discomfort, just as he has had to do so often in his career, Smart said. “Sometimes you run into players that are just stubborn about wanting to push the envelope and go further than maybe the doctors want them to go at that point,” Smart said. “That was definitely him. But I’ll give him a lot of credit for how hard he attacked.” In a Dec. 20 game against Oklahoma State, Williams made his first significant contribution of his sophomore campaign. His four offensive rebounds and energy off the bench would prove crucial in Texas’s 77-74 win. The backup guard is often the seventh or eighth man off the bench, behind the three starting guards: senior Matt Coleman, redshirt junior Andrew Jones and junior Courtney Ramey. “Let’s say he’s out there with two out of the three (starting guards),” Smart said. “He doesn’t necessarily have to create.” But Williams will have to shoot the ball better and capitalize on open looks to contribute in his role off the bench. The sophomore shot 2-of-9 against Kansas and then 0-for-4 against Iowa State. He stayed after the Iowa State game in the Frank Erwin Center to get shot after shot up. Smart said Williams has been spending a lot of time working on his shot. It’s the same drive that pushed him to play through pain and through a long recovery. “We see it in practice every day,” Ramey said. “I think the biggest thing for him is confidence and just believing in himself because we believe in him.”

At this time last year, the Texas men’s basketball team was flailing through another disappointing year. The Longhorns lost by 38 points on the road in West Virginia, the most lopsided loss of head coach Shaka Smart’s tenure. Less than two weeks later, Texas tipped off a four-game losing streak to put the team at a discouraging 4–8 in Big 12 conference play. In his fifth season as head coach, Smart appeared to be suffering through his final days at The University of Texas. Flash forward a calendar year and Smart has his team ranked No. 5 in the nation, off to a hot 11–2 start with impressive wins over North Carolina, Kansas and West Virginia. “One year ago seems like 10 years ago,” Smart said in a Jan. 11 teleconference. “I think the guys have taken ownership of just trying to work towards being a better team over the course of the last 12 months.” Last year’s Texas team took a lot of criticism from restless fans for their underwhelming results on the court. This year’s Longhorns haven’t forgotten what that felt like to endure, Smart said. “There's certainly some lessons that you can take from that as human beings but then also as coaches and players,” Smart said. “I certainly haven’t forgotten that. That's something that we use (as motivation).” The turnaround began right after the four-game conference losing streak last season. Texas rattled off five straight wins, which brought the Longhorns back onto the NCAA Tournament bubble before the season came to a halt because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “What we have to remember is any time we've been in a certain position before, like winning a couple games, losing a game, two games whatever it may be, (we have) to glean lessons from those experiences,” Smart said. At the beginning of this season, Texas retained every player from the previous season. The only new face was five-star freshman forward Greg Brown. Smart’s squad is now one of the most talented and experienced teams in the country, and that experience is paying off on the court. “We know with winning comes a lot of praise, a lot of high-fives,” senior guard Matt Coleman said in a Jan. 7 teleconference. “But we also know how it feels to be on the other end, having a roller coaster of a season and just keeping the mindset of one game at a time.” Over the years, Smart has become known for his animated style of coaching on the sidelines. The 43-year-old is often seen getting down on one knee to slam the floor or wildly waving his arms when his team is on defense. Smart’s intensity provides the Longhorns with an extra burst of energy, Coleman said. “It’s good to feel his presence,” Coleman said. “It just creates more energy for myself and the team to want to get a stop or to buy in.” The Longhorns feel like they are playing 6-on-5 on the defensive end with the talking between the five players on the court combined with Smart on the sideline, Brown said. “I love it,” Brown said. “It gets me going in games just knowing that he’s locked in, and everybody else is locked in, so I have no choice but to lock in.” Smart’s contagious game-time energy is part of how he forms tight relationships with his players — something that will be crucial going forward as Texas navigates an unusual season.  “He creates relationships in different ways,” Coleman said. “The little things matter, you know, definitely from a head coach in a Division I program.”

Texas workers continue to tap unemployment insurance at an elevated rate weeks into the new year. Nearly 51,000 claims for first-time unemployment insurance were filed by Texas workers during the week that ended Jan. 16, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Labor Jan. 21. It's a decrease of some 14,000 claims, or 21.5%, from the week prior, when nearly 65,000 unemployment claims were filed in Texas. The number of jobless claims filed each week by Texas workers, a proxy for layoffs,…