In D’Hanis, Woolls was far more than a football legend
D’HANIS — This is not the story of a championship. Twenty-four years ago, we were not about to win one of those, and we knew it.
But what happened in this small South Texas town over the course of one November week in 1994 remains an all-time masterpiece of motivation, pulled off by the greatest football coach I’ve ever known.
The remarkable thing is he needed only nine words to do it.
Clayton “Butch” Woolls died at the age of 79 last week, and he left behind dozens of stories like this one. Over the course of 36 seasons as head coach at D’Hanis High School, he won more football games than all but five people in the history of the San Antohas nio area, but that doesn’t quite do his legacy justice.
Not only did he coach fathers and sons on the field, teach mothers and daughters in the classroom, and drive uncles and nephews home on the school bus, he even stuck around long enough to coach a few grandfathers and grandsons. Each of us our favorite Mr. Woolls anecdote, and I’m not saying mine is best. It’s just best.
The truth is, we’d let him down. He’d taught us better than to act the way we did in that loss at Harper in the second-to-last game of the season, losing our cool, bickering in the huddle, turning on each other. It went against everything he’d instilled in us. It went against everything he’d instilled in our cousins. It went against everything he’d instilled in our dads.
For the next week, he didn’t say a word. He showed up for practice every day, his whistle around his neck, and he’d blow it when it was time to move on from one drill to the next. He had a single assistant — which truthfully was one more than he needed — and that coach gave a few limited instructions, but other than that, we heard nothing.
Mr. Woolls didn’t speak when we hit the sled. He didn’t speak during “blood and guts.” He didn’t speak on suit day, and he didn’t speak at the pep rally. In fact, we didn’t hear his voice until five seconds before we left the locker room to take the field for that homecoming game, when he stopped in the doorway, turned to look at us and spoke the sentence none of us ever will forget.
“If y’all want my respect,” he said, “go kick their (rears).”
Oh, how we wanted that man’s
respect. And it’s not as though he ever had been unwilling to give it. All he asked for was effort.
Rarely was he more proud than when a seventh-grader in his social studies class improved her grade from a C to a B, or when the slowest kid on the team hustled across the finish line of a wind sprint, or especially when an aimless teenager found a sense of purpose.
D’Hanis is like a lot of small towns, where some kids grow up expecting to go to college, and some kids grow up expecting to run the farm, and some kids grow up not expecting to be anything, until somebody tells them they can. For more kids than he ever knew, Mr. Woolls was that somebody.
Perhaps the best team he coached at D’Hanis — or at least one of the top two or three — was the 1992 squad that went undefeated until losing to Bartlett on
a last-second field goal in the area round of the playoffs. Bartlett went on steamroll its way to the Class A state championship.
The quarterback of that 1992 team was Robert Tapia, and what he remembers most about the man he calls a “mentor” is not any specific piece of strategic genius, but something far simpler.
“He believed in me,” Tapia said this week. “He believed in us.”
Belief is everything, isn’t it? There are few better gifts a coach can give a player, or a teacher can give a student, and Mr. Woolls gave it over and over again.
His lessons, like his playbook, were not complex. He valued doing simple things well, and thought that confidence came from repetition. He coached in 348 games at D’Hanis, winning 207 of them, and if you dig up the tapes, you’ll notice the Cowboys always ran a split-back offense with a wingback and a tight end, and a split-six defense with a single safety.
If you watch carefully, you’ll notice something else, too. With
maybe a handful of exceptions, the first offensive play of every game was either 31 or 32 Wedge.
“We’d line up and run a play everybody knew was coming for 30 years,” Tapia said, laughing. “It didn’t matter.”
We learned to speak Mr. Woolls’ language, which meant that when a back was running particularly hard or a defender was especially active, he was unleashing “pneumonia.” When the group slacked off, we were “a bunch of mullets.”
And when he thought we were underperforming, he would growl, “Whassamattah?” until one brutally hot afternoon when, in a legendary moment of comedic timing, either Chad Mund or Mark Rodriguez answered, “Wantsomewatah.”
Mr. Woolls chuckled hard at that, a deep, gruff laugh known well by not only his players, but by his wife, Sue, and his three kids, and by the friends he grew up with in Hondo and saw almost every day of his life.
If his players didn’t always
realize he was asking no more of them than he would have expected from himself, those old friends sure did. John Windrow knew Mr. Woolls since they were 5 years old, and they were teammates on the Hondo High School team that made it to the state championship game in 1956.
Mr. Woolls, all 5-foot-9 and 190 pounds of him, was the star running back, with thick calves and a nonstop motor, but in the state semifinals against Humble he went down in a heap. His knee was mangled, a mess of what probably was torn cartilage and ligaments. The Owls knew they’d need him in the title game against Humble.
“They were drawing about a pint of blood out of his knee every day for a week,” Windrow said. “He tried to play. He wanted to play. But his knee was torn apart.”
The Owls came up short without him, but he was determined not to let that be his peak. He went off to school at Stephen F. Austin, earned his degree, then came home and accepted a job as an assistant coach at D’Hanis, nine miles from Hondo.
And three decades later, he stood there in that doorway, uttering the nine words that those of us who heard them still talk about.
You can look up the box score of that game if you wish. The newspaper microfilm will show that, on the last day of a season in which D’Hanis finished with five victories and five losses, the Cowboys beat Nueces Canyon by a score of 48-0.
What the clippings will not tell you, however, is that every kid wearing home gold jerseys and plain white helmets that night was convinced they were winning something more valuable, more precious. Even if we’d never really lost it in the first place, we set out to earn the respect of a man we admired.
With pride, we carry it with us still.