‘I won’t do another year like this one,’ says Aledo’s state champion football coach
To celebrate yet another state title, Aledo football coach Tim Buchanan is currently living the good life of quarantine.
One day after Aledo won its 10th state football title, back on Jan. 15, Buchanan joined a friend for a hunting trip. It was the first time he had gone anywhere that was not football-related since before the season started.
A few days later, the friend tested positive for COVID, and now Buchanan is on the back end of being stuck in the house.
“As of today, still no symptoms,” said the 60-year-old coach.
The purposes of this phone call was to see if Buchanan had any thoughts of stepping away again from coaching what has become one of the most successful football programs in the nation. It’s not as if he has a lot to prove.
“When I came back in 2019, I said I’d do it five more years,” he said. “Right now, this pandemic made it feel like five years. If I don’t feel better about this in May or June, or a better sense of what football is going to be like in the fall, I don’t want to have another year. I won’t do another year like this one.”
The earliest we will know what the 2021 high school football season is going to look like is July. Considering how wrong most of us have been on predicting the return of the season that just ended, Buchanan is not guessing what anything will look like.
Buchanan admits when he retired from coaching the first time to become Aledo’s full-time athletic director, he was too young. He’s now 60, and he says he’s not walking through another COVID football season twice.
Buchanan’s attitude about COVID has changed, which makes him no different than anyone else. Once you have it, or have someone close to you who’s struggling with it, it will alter your view.
“People would ask me what was so bad about it, but you don’t understand the stress of it because you had no freakin’ control over any of it,” he said. “Two games I get calls when we get off the team bus that we aren’t going to play because of contact tracing.
“I never knew when we were going to get shut down. We played games without coaches, or kids. We had to postpone a game because we had 58 players out.
“Other schools had to cancel games on us. On a Thursday night at 7, I get a call from the other school saying we can’t play tomorrow. We went three weeks like that.”
Then there was the stretch in late October and early November when a slew of his players were out because of either positive test results or contact tracing.
That led to Buchanan to tell me that the root of the problem were “knuckleheaded parents” who were holding Halloween and homecoming parties, which led to a surge in COVID-related absences on his team.
On the bright side, the term “knucklehaded parents” became a rallying point for the Aledo football community, and was even turned into a T-shirt. (I’m more than a little hurt because I still have not received one.)
Despite all of the obstacles, Aledo lost but one game, and won yet another state title.
Buchanan retired from coaching in the summer of 2014. He tried to retire all together in 2018. When he did, a district employee told him it would take him four years to burn through all of his “personal leave” days.
“I told myself [in 2014] after the first month I had made a mistake. I realized how much I missed it,” Buchanan said. “I should have said to hire another athletic director. I was worn out. Between coaching in the fall, and then all of the sports in the spring I didn’t have any time.”
When he returned in the summer of 2019, the idea was to coach for five more years.
The more he works, the closer Buchanan approaches G.A. Moore and Gordon Wood territory as the most successful coaches in the history of Texas high school football.
“To be mentioned with those guys, guys who are heroes of mine, would be nice,” Buchanan said, “but it’s not the reason I coach.”
As of today, Buchanan’s timeline to remain coaching is unchanged. He’s not retiring again until he knows the decision is right.
And so far, the only thing that might alter that timeline would be having to defend against COVID for another year.
