Escalante coach with 3 state titles leaves for Jal
Giles — who handed SFHS an epic defeat — led Lobos to 97-30 record
The lasting memory of coach Dusty Giles in Santa Fe will forever be the night he rolled off the team bus on a Friday the 13th and led his team to one of the most memorable wins in New Mexico high school football history.
If he has his choice, it’ll be one of the last times he’ll be in this end of the state for quite a while.
Giles, 44, recently announced that he is leaving his post as athletic director and head football coach at Escalante High School to take over the football program at Jal.
Geographically speaking, it’s about as far as you can get from Tierra Amarilla in the northern part of the state and still call New Mexico home. Located in the extreme southeast corner of the state south of Hobbs, Jal is less than a five-minute drive from the Texas state line to both the east and the south.
“I guess it is a little bit of a change, yeah,” Giles said last week.
As Escalante’s head coach, he had a record of 97-30 and three state titles in two stints with the program. Giles was head coach of the Lobos from 2006-07 and from 2011-19 and took Escalante to the finals four times between 2012 and 2017.
He also engineered a huge upset of Santa Fe High on
Oct. 13, 2017, marking just the second time in state history that a school from New Mexico’s smallest classification beat a team from one of the biggest. That’s a night Giles said he’ll never forget — for more reasons than just the lopsided final score, a 39-6 rout that cemented Escalante’s status as a smallschool juggernaut.
That night, the team’s two-hour bus ride down from Tierra Amarilla turned into an eight-hour ordeal when traffic came to a standstill just south of Pojoaque. A fatal car accident left the Lobos idling in the team bus for hours.
“We had two full-length movies and we watched them both and were still stuck there,”
Giles said.
The Lobos eventually arrived at 10 p.m., more than two hours after the Santa Fe High spirit band, cheerleaders and most of the fans had gone home. It was homecoming and everyone else had something to do.
Giles and the Lobos got off the bus and immediately went to work.
“I just remember someone asking me how long we needed, and all I said was we needed a few minutes to get some guys taped and other guys to get to the bathroom,” Giles said. “We didn’t need any more time.”
The Lobos scored on the game’s second play and turned what was a close game at halftime into a comfortable winning
margin. The final play was run shortly after midnight Saturday, Oct. 14.
Of course, the lasting memory of three state championships supersedes that one game. Same, too, for a loss to Jal in Giles’ first playoff game as a head coach in 2006.
“They totally destroyed us. I mean totally took us apart,” he said.
Giles left for a three-year stint as Estancia’s coach in 2008, returning to Escalante in 2011. His second season back with the Lobos, he led the team to a blowout win over the Panthers that set the tone for a run to the Class 1A state title a couple months later.
From there, the Lobos were off and running, turning a town known for its basketball into a football hotbed. It prompted the school to replace its grass field — which was often lined just a screen pass outside the lines by cars and trucks on game nights — with a state-of-the-art facility whose trademark red turf field has become one of New Mexico’s most talked-about fields.
Home to many ranchers and outdoor-loving types who use the bordering mountains as an escape to hunt and fish, Giles fell in love with the surroundings. It was a far cry from his upbringing in Artesia, a blue-collar town in the heart of southeastern New Mexico’s oil and gas industry.
“I love [Tierra Amarilla] but I have to be honest, I’ve always had my eye on Jal’s program,” Giles said. “It was one of those jobs I was considering before I came back [to Escalante] that second time.”
Jal’s facility, he said, is pretty good — but not quite as eye-popping as Escalante’s red turf.
“It’s green but, you know, that’s OK,” he said. “As long as it’s got lines on it.”
What Giles would like to avoid is a matchup between his new team and his old one.
“I’d rather not have that happen but I know it just might,” he said. “Had it happen my first year in Estancia and it’s not fun. I’d rather not do that again.”