JUST GETTING STARTED
With state championship as reward, Paetow building its football program on hard work
The signage around the athletic facilities at Paetow High
School includes typical motivational sayings.
A particularly strong one is, “The Standard Is Excellence.”
While it looks good on a wall, the saying rings true when youngsters who have been told that their entire high school football careers end the season dancing around AT&T Stadium in Arlington with a state championship trophy.
That is what the Panthers were able to do a week ago, as they claimed the Class 5A Division I championship in just the fourth year of varsity play for the school.
Being district mates with state and national power Katy High School, a standard bearer for the past 2½ decades, Paetow is an impressive startup.
While the Paetow building is pristine, the paint on the walls is still fresh and the plates in the weight room are in superb condition, you can smell the sweat and feel the work that has been put into building a championship program.
A daily grind that earned a deserved reward. Particularly a year after their season ended not with a loss but a forfeit in the playoffs because of COVID issues.
“We work to ‘the standard is excellence,’ ” junior linebacker Alex Kilgore said. “We know not everybody’s perfect, not everybody’s excellent. But you can always work towards it.
“And if you try to work towards it, then you can help out the outcome in your favor.”
Kilgore was certainly working toward it when he was all over the field, chasing ballcarriers throughout the Panthers’ 15-1 run to the championship, but Paetow coach B.J. Gotte said it is the day-to-day work his players put in that resulted in their ultimate victory.
This isn’t a team loaded with 4- and 5-star recruits. It is a very good football team with very good football players, who strive for excellence.
“Do your best every day — that’s kind of our mantra,” Gotte said. “We have goals, and we reference our long-term goals, but we focus on the day and we talk to kids about, if you’re doing your best every day and you have a championship mindset every day, the things around the stage may change, but the game doesn’t.
“And that’s kind of what you hear the players talk about when we get in big moments.”
Big moments such as the thin line between victory and defeat, when facing a fourth-and-1 in overtime of the state title game against College Station, Gotte eschewed the game-tying field goal and elected to trust his offensive line and quarterback C.J. Dumas to deliver.
Well, of course he did, considering Gotte was a star offensive lineman at Katy and an All-American at Texas Lutheran.
Dumas picked up the first down, then confidently handed the ball to Jacob Brown who burst through for the gamewinning touchdown.
“I knew whenever we got that close to the goal line that Jacob was going to punch in. We just had to give him that opportunity,” Dumas said.
A few days later, Dumas and Brown walked around campus at Paetow excited but not surprised.
Brown, a senior who plans to major in business at college, describes the eighth grader he was when he arrived on the connected middle school campus as undisciplined and childish.
The deep bass voice was going to come naturally. The discipline, he says, was taught by Gotte.
“He showed us the way, especially he showed me the way and showed that if you stay disciplined, you stay focused, here’s what you can do,” said Brown, who rushed for 348 yards and five touchdowns in a state quarterfinal win over Hightower.
As do most outstanding coaches, Gotte deflects praise in his direction. But he played on great teams at Katy under Mike Johnston and later coached on state title-winning teams there under Gary Joseph.
When he accepted the job at Paetow, he knew what it took to build a winning tradition.
The writings on the wall could have been painted by anybody. Clearly, Gotte understood how to bring the words to life.
“The Standard Is Excellence” isn’t just employed by sports teams. Myriad businesses and groups — from medical facilities, to restaurants, to nonprofits and even a USS warship — tout it as a working theme.
The implementation of the words, the belief in it from the kids, is what makes this football program stand out. Oh yeah, they are talented too.
Defensive back Kentrell Webb, the defensive MVP of the state championship game who plans to be an architect, credits the Panthers coaches with the team’s success.
“We’ve been dreaming about this feeling for a long time, so to get to get it and actually pull off the (win) was amazing,” Webb said. “Our coach preached to us … if you are always prepared, you don’t have to get prepared.”
And, of course, the standard is excellence for a squad whose team leaders post their GPAs in their Twitter profiles.
Just a group of sharp young men who are championship football players.
“We talk about setting a standard of excellence and then being able to rise to the challenge and set the bar about as high as you can set it,” Gotte said. “They’ve left some pretty big shoes to fill.
“As a coach, you enjoy stuff like this, but then you immediately start moving on to the next challenge. And the next challenge is being successful next year. So, these seniors, they’ll get to enjoy it for the rest of their lives. The rest of them, we got to go back to work.”
The man is talking about getting back to work on next season while still replying to hundreds of congratulatory text messages a few days after this season ended.
According to Gotte, excellence doesn’t take days off.