🎇 Dude Perfect Turned Kaboom Town Into a Trick Shot Arena - Your Frisco 4th Guide

Addison’s Kaboom Town delivered big yesterday, with Dude Perfect and State Farm bringing an in-person version of the Impossible Challenge to Addison Circle Park. Fans competed on the Impossible Soccer Wall for national leaderboard spots, met Sparky and the Dude Perfect Panda, and got the full trick-shot experience alongside the massive fireworks and air show.

Dude Perfect and State Farm are debuting an in-person version of the Impossible Challenge, the trick shot series that made Dude Perfect a household name. The centerpiece is an Impossible Soccer Wall where fans can compete for a spot on a national leaderboard. It's free, it runs from 5 to 11pm, and you'll also get to meet Sparky and the Dude Perfect Panda.

Fun fact for anyone new to town like I was in 2023: Dude Perfect's headquarters is right here in Frisco. So this isn't some traveling activation randomly stopping through, it's basically a hometown group showing off in front of the hometown crowd before it heads to Philly, Dallas and Atlanta later this summer.

Stonebriar Centre just rolled out a wave of new stores, with more on the way through the fall. Already open: a relocated, bigger Aéropostale, women's fashion brand Edikted, and Sukoshi Mart for Japanese and Korean beauty products and snacks.

Opened yesterday: Abercrombie & Fitch and Offline by Aerie. Later this year you can expect Dick's House of Sport, Princess Polly, JD Sports and a few others.

The mall is also throwing a free community event on July 25 from 1 to 3pm in Center Court, with a live DJ, free popsicles and gift card giveaways.

With Texas heating up fast this week, I figured this was worth a plain-English explainer, because I genuinely didn't understand how any of this worked until I looked it up myself.

ERCOT runs the state's power grid, but here's the part that surprised me: ERCOT doesn't actually own any power plants or lines. Think of it more like air traffic control. It watches the whole system, keeps supply and demand balanced, and steps in during emergencies, but the actual generation and delivery is handled by a bunch of separate companies.

That setup goes back to a 1999 law that opened up Texas' electric market to competition. It's why about 85% of Texas households, including most of us here in Frisco, get to actually pick our electricity provider. If you're ever comparison shopping, powertochoose.org is the official site the state runs for that.

Why this matters for your Fourth of July plans: the systems involved in delivering power are separate from the systems ERCOT controls, so a random outage on your street is usually a local issue, not a grid-wide one. The last true grid emergency was the 2023 heat wave, and before that, Winter Storm Uri in 2021. So far this summer, no rotating outage warnings, just the usual July forecast of "hot, then hotter."

Nothing actionable here, just the kind of thing I like knowing before I'm standing in front of a dark thermostat at 9pm wondering if I should panic. File it away for the next heat advisory.