By RYAN S. CLARK
November 6, 2009
Posted: November 6, 2009, 6:02 PM CST
Beaumont Enterprise
As a former player and someone that has twice coached the Evadale football team, Mark Williams has seen a lot of things at his alma mater.
When the Evadale coach played at the school from 1979 to 1982, he saw four different coaches run the program. Twenty-six years later, he coached the District 23-A school to a district title last season. But tonight, if Evadale defeats Colmesneil, Williams can say he witnessed Evadale’s first undefeated regular season in school history.
“We did not have aspirations of doing it when the season started,” said Williams, who started his second stint at Evadale three years ago. “Our goal is to take it to the next level in the playoffs, but I’d be tickled to death to go undefeated.”
Evadale, along with Port Neches-Groves and Newton, have the opportunity to have perfect regular seasons should they all win tonight. Newton plays Kirbyville, which went undefeated in the regular season last year, to decide the District 22-2A title. As for PN-G, it plays Central to decide the District 20-4A winner.
As two of the area’s most historic programs, Newton and PN-G are familiar with going undefeated in the regular season.
The last time Newton was undefeated came in 2005 as it went 13-0 en route to winning the Class 2A state title. Longtime Newton coach Curtis Barbay, who came to the program as an assistant in 1974, has gone undefeated four times since he took over the program in 1975.
As for PN-G, it’s been a while.
The last time PN-G went undefeated in the regular season, its current head coach Brandon Faircloth was four years old.
PN-G has gone undefeated in the regular season four times in its 84-year history, but the last time it happened came in 1977 when it was coached by Doug Ethridge, a member of the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame.
“You have to have good players, a good coaching staff with you and even then, it’s still not easy,” said the 78-year old Ethridge, who now lives in Mansfield, near Dallas. “The first year we did it, we had a lot of players coming back from the 1975 team that won state. But you never know when you are going to go undefeated.”
Ethridge said going undefeated in the regular season was a daily work in progress because there is so much to handle.
For starters, Ethridge and his coaching staff worked on how to keep their players motivated. Then there was making sure Ethridge and his staff also stayed motivated.
One thing that was not a problem, at least for Ethridge, was the constant talk from fans about going undefeated.
“PN-G did not have a booster club while I was there so I never really heard much from people about needing to win this game or that game,” he said. “I didn’t hear that. Now maybe some of my coaches or kids heard that. But I never did.”
Ethridge, who left PN-G in 1983, said he’s not had the chance to talk with Faircloth about the season.
Then again, the argument could be made that Faircloth might not need any help to begin with. Prior to his PN-G arrival, Faircloth has coached at three schools – Austin Westlake, Highland Park and Odessa Permian – that have gone undefeated five times.
In Faircloth’s final two seasons at Permian, the team went undefeated until it lost in the regional round both years.
“As a whole, those teams were not all that different,” Faircloth said. “A lot of those teams have a lot in common by having great practices, coaches and players. When you have all those things, it gives you a chance to be successful.”
Faircloth said winning one football game is hard enough, much less trying to win ten in a row.
“To be where we are, we are very fortunate but we did not come in here thinking, we’d be 10-0,” he said. “But we focused on the small things like working hard, practicing well and then doing a whole lot of praying.”
