The best story in the Texas high school football playoffs is Fort Worth’s North Side
North Side principal Antonio Martinez is actively trying to find a T-shirt, or a sign — something — that says the Steers are in the Texas high school football playoffs for the first time since 1979. Just some piece of memorabilia that says the Steers made it.
The T-shirts aren’t quite ready yet. The signs aren’t quite finished. The pep rally was being put together midweek.
“When you haven’t made the playoffs in 40 years, you’re not quite sure what to do,” he said Tuesday, tongue in cheek. “Next year, when we make it, we’ll have this done in advance.”
Every year the Texas high school playoffs produce a story that makes you stop and ask rhetorically, “Wait ... what just happened?”
This year, that story is in Fort Worth, at North Side High School.
Coach Joseph Turner, a former TCU running back who was given the job five years ago despite having zero head coaching experience, has the Steers in the playoffs.
They will play Wichita Falls at 7 p.m. Friday night at Farrington Field in a Class 5A bi-district playoff game.
Forget the players, there are parents of kids on this team who were not alive the last time the Steers played a playoff football game.
Unless you are around from these parts, or are well-versed in Texas high school football, you won’t understand the scale of North Side’s achievement. For decades, North Side has been one of the most difficult jobs in the state.
Coach Turner and his entire team are helping to dispel the myth that a team composed almost entirely of Latinos can’t succeed at football.
“I know they can play,” Turner said.
North Side, then and now
In 1979, the President of the United States was unpopular, the price of gas was 86 cents a gallon, Bruce Jenner was one of the most successful men in the world, one team per district made the Texas high school playoffs and North Side’s football roster was composed of 36 players.
Some things change. Some don’t.
Of those 36 North Side players in 1979, nearly half were African American.
“The year we went to the playoffs was my junior year. We were very diverse,” said Gary Arteaga, a North Side alum who played on that ‘79 team. “We had Latinos, Anglos, African Americans. We were a good team.”
Today, there is one African American player on the Steers’ roster.
North Side’s enrollment is 1,800 students — 95% are Latino.
The Steers typically have done well in cross country. Soccer. Baseball. The girls volleyball team reached the playoffs.
“We have the best mariachi in the state,” Martinez, the principal, said.
Football? Not so much.
“When I played, football was very much the prime sport at North Side,” Arteaga said.
In 1979, the Steers won the district and played against McKinney in the Class 3A bi-district game. The Steers lost 7-0. McKinney won three more games to win the state title.
Forty short years later, when four teams per district make the playoffs, the Steers are back in.
Former TCU player leads North Side to success
Sitting in his office, now sporting a growing beard, Joseph Turner looks little like the TCU running back who played for the Horned Frogs from 2006 to ‘09. He is 32 with a wife and two young daughters.
When he took the job, he had no idea about the history of Fort Worth football outside of TCU, much less North Side.
After two years as an assistant, he was promoted to the head coaching title, in part because of his ties to TCU and specifically having played for Gary Patterson.
“This was my first coaching job, and I had no expectations of this,” he said. “My plan was just to win some games.”
The Steers didn’t exactly win a lot. In Turner’s first four years, the Steers were 14-36.
He now knows the rarity of what this team has accomplished this season. The Steers finished 5-5, including 4-2 in district. He has a good team that, with quarterback Isaak Rosales, receiver Da’Wain Lofton and more than 10 other starters returning, could be better next season.
“I don’t think the players do really know what they’ve done, and I actually prefer it that way,” he said. “So (the playoffs) will be just another game. Once they recognize what they’ve done, and accomplished, they lighten up, and that’s not what we want.”
Not many people at North Side these days can appreciate the historical enormity of what the Steers’ football team achieved this season in making the playoffs.
Not because they don’t care, because they weren’t alive the last time it happened.
But next time they make it, the T-shirts and signs will be ready.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
