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Saturday, December 1, 2007
Disciples of Coach K.
Collin County, TX
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By: Jim Donovan
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Photo(s) By: Robert Hughes
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A long list of players and coaches have benefited from the wisdom and mentorship of Coach Tom Kimbrough
On the night of Oct. 3, 1986, the Plano Wildcats were on the brink of making football history.
Not the kind of history head coach Tom Kimbrough would have liked to write home about.
The Wildcats were reeling from two-straight losses and were facing a talented Newman Smith team.
And it didn’t look good for the powerhouse program when the Trojans opened up a quick seven-point lead.
“We were wondering, is this going to be one of the worst Plano teams in history,” said then senior offensive lineman and current McKinney North head coach Shawn Pratt.
Kimbrough couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t let it happen.
Parading down the sideline in a stoic manner as his team marched down the field to set up an and-goal situation, the legendary head coach called a timeout and gave a speech not one player from that team would ever forget.
Months later, the Wildcats defeated LaMarque, 24-7, for the first of what would be two consecutive 5A Texas State Championships.
While Kimbrough would undoubtedly say he was blessed with a talented bunch of great people both on his roster and among his coaching ranks, they would attribute all of their successes in some form or fashion to their former head coach.
“The thing I remember about Coach is his confidence,” former tight ends coach and current Plano West leader Mike Hughes said. “First of all, he has very strong character and a strong spiritual life. He’s the type of coach you want your kid to have…incredibly strong work ethic. He wasn’t a hollerer or a screamer, but when he spoke to you, you knew he knew and meant what he was saying.”
It’s no wonder so many of Kimbrough’s former assistants and players have today grown into leaders themselves.
The many former Plano coaches, such as Hughes and former Plano coach and Plano ISD athletic director Gerald Brence, and players, like Pratt and former running back Chris Howard, among many others, attribute much of the successes they’ve had in their current lives to their former leader.
“Most of what I learned and I do as a head coach I learned from him,” Pratt said. “The work ethic, organization, discipline. Now I make sure we always have a plan, everything’s scripted. We don’t just go out to practice and do what comes to us.”
Like Pratt, Hughes remembers the amount of time spent in the film room dissecting each and every opponent, something he likes to believe he does a fair share of with his playoff-bound Wolves.
“Coaches these days don’t know the kind of time we put in back then,” Hughes said. “We really put in long hours.”
For people like Howard, though, Kimbrough’s mentorship led him down a bit of a different road.
While he isn’t a coach, Howard, a graduate of the Air Force Academy and Rhode Scholar, works in a place of higher education as the Vice President for Strategic and Leadership Initiatives at the University of Oklahoma.
“He’s a person that stresses doing the little things right,” Howard, who earned his doctorate at Oxford, said of his old coach. “He would always tell us that practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. He would instill in us, do the little things right and big things will happen. It was very much what you saw is what you got.
“He was just as much a life coach as he was a football coach.”
Every member from that historic 1986 state championship football team remains close with each other, having most recently reunited with the rest of their fellow 1987 Plano graduates at the 20-year high school reunion.
They’ll never deny the feeling of supreme bliss they felt when the final whistle sounded during their drubbing of LaMarque. But they’ll always give the credit to the man they feel it was due.
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