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Saturday, December 1, 2007
Reviving Paschal
Fort Worth, TX
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Photo(s) By: Shawn Smajstrla
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Not all coaches would be interested in taking over a team that went 0-10 the previous year, but first-year Paschal head football coach Matt Cook not only accepted the challenge, he embraced and welcomed it.
I’m a Fort Worth boy. I was born and raised in this district and grew up in Paschal’s district. I’ve got a lot of friends and acquaintances that went to school here. There are tons of good kids walking the halls. It’s a large Hispanic population. My kids are half Hispanic and my wife is Hispanic, so that was appealing to me. I feel like I have something in common with those boys. And, I like taking over programs that people say can’t be done.
I started at Nolan Catholic, where I went to high school. I worked there for four years. I was promoted pretty early as a coordinator on the defensive side of the ball. My last year at Nolan I took over the offensive coordinator job. From there I went to All Saints Episcopal School. They were 2-8 when I got there. I stayed there for six years and won two championships with them. Last year I was in the Arlington ISD.
If you look at some of the other sports here [at Paschal] they’re highly competitive. If you look at golf, they have state championships. If you look at baseball, there are 110 boys playing baseball. There are some athletic kids from all different races. If you look at soccer, both boys and girls, they’re highly competitive. The wrestling program is only a couple of years old and it’s highly competitive. So, that just told me that football is behind a little bit and obviously it can be done. You’ve just got to walk the halls, get the kids out, and make the kids feel good about what they’re doing. I knew I could come in here and make a difference.
The toughest part is getting the kids to believe that they have “win” written all over them and getting them to practice like a winner. And, there’s the numbers game. We’re competing against teams that are laced with 40 to 60 seniors and right now I’m at 17. That’s been the hardest thing…to play with a limited number of juniors and seniors. We’ve had to play quite a few sophomores, which isn’t what you like to do.
The first thing I did [upon arriving at Paschal] was hire my staff. I wanted to hire a staff that the kids wanted to be around. I wanted a good group of guys that was fairly experienced. I wanted some guys that had a wealth of knowledge and that had been around. And I wanted some guys that were young and vibrant, but all eager to win and all had goals themselves.
The initial reaction [from the players] was excitement. Of course, kids are always skeptical at first, but I think once they realized we’re here for them regardless of win or lose and that we’ll fight for them every day, that not only are we asking them to work hard, but that we’re working hard for them. We are in the range of about 145 boys playing football. Last year they were at about 100, so we’ve made progress, and we haven’t lost any kids.
The goals that we set for this first year were to increase participation, keep the kids excited, and to be highly prepared and highly competitive for every game. Obviously, that hasn’t happened, but we showed signs of it. Our first four games we were within a touchdown of winning or tying, so we made progress there.
In three years time, I want our numbers to be anywhere from 220 to 250 – a regular 5A program’s numbers. And we want to increase the facilities. We want to be comparable to some of the schools we’re competing against. A lot of our kids are inner-city kids and this is all they have. This is their family and they hang out here. This is where they want to be. We want them to really feel good about what they’re doing and where they’re from and the facilities that they have.
The kids are still craving more. We’ve got more kids that want to come out. We’ve got more kids lined up for the spring, and to me that’s a good sign. Our younger levels, from our junior high up to JV, they aren’t just competing, they’re winning – and with smaller numbers against our bigger opponents. And we seem to outclass others, which I really like. We really seem to understand the sportsmanship part and the being a classy program part. Even though we’re not winning on the field all the time, we’re winning in more ways than just on the scoreboard.
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