McAllen took the top spot in this year’s It’s Time Texas Community Challenge for the fourth year in a row in the ‘Large’ community category.
It’s Time Texas is a nonprofit with the goal of empowering Texans to live healthier lives and is committed to improving health within households, school, workplace environments and more.
The challenge is an eight-week, statewide competition where communities compete to see who can earn the most by participating in various healthy activities and logging them via their app.
This year McAllen was able to accumulate over 5 million points with the community’s 3,577 registered participant’s collective efforts. With over 27,000 health activities submitted, McAllen was once again named the winners of this year’s competition in its category.
Categories are based on the community’s population size.
McAllen competed against other cities like Edinburg and Brownsville because their population ranges between 100,001 and 300,000.
Pharr, who took first place in the ‘Medium’ category, competed against Harlingen and Weslaco whose populations range between 40,000 and 100,000.
Other categories include Metro, Small and Extra Small. The winners for those categories were San Antonio, Los Fresnos and Smithville, respectively.
McAllen ISD also took the top spot in the Medium School District Challenge with PSJA ISD winning the Large and Los Fresnos CISD taking the Small categories.
This year’s competition was also met with a few challenges of its own.
Due to the current pandemic, larger, in-person, group gatherings were discouraged but the nonprofit asked its participants to hold virtual gatherings, such holding a fitness class over zoom, if they so choose.
If virtual gatherings weren’t possible though, participants were allowed to hold mini events with attendance below 10 people as long as they maintained social distancing and followed CDC guidelines.
