We Love the Westlake Chaps. No, Really.
When you’ve won so many games by so many points for so long, bitterness comes with the territory—but it’s finally time to stop hating the best high school football team of the decade.
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Every summer, Schroeder gathers his twelve assistants—some of whom have been at Westlake since the early eighties—for a week of meetings. They go over the offense, the defense, the players, the strategies. The architect of the Westlake system looks younger than his 52 years, his body as fit and his hair as disciplined as his team. He went to school at the University of Texas at Austin and Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, where he got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, respectively, in education (he is certified as a high school counselor). He’s not the mythic good ol’ boy Texas football coach, yet his drawl—he’s from Schulenberg—marks him as an outsider in the suburbs.
Schroeder’s methods are part Vince Lombardi, part Bill Walsh. Like the Packer legend, he emphasizes conditioning, fundamentals, repetition, and discipline, and he motivates his players to play beyond their expectations. “He won’t let you lose,” says Martindale. “If you do, you’ll pay the price at the next practice.” Like the 49ers coach, Schroeder employs a sophisticated, wide-open offense, with various sets and complicated plays. Last season his offense averaged an astounding 405 yards a game. Schroeder works extensively with his quarterbacks and almost every year develops a great thrower, such as Purdue University Heisman trophy candidate Drew Brees (class of ’97). Many high school offenses are stuck in the sixties, almost exclusively running the ball; Westlake’s keeps defenses off balance. The Chaps run reverses, motion plays, and the Bum-a-roo-ski, a trick play that involves a running back playing possum with the ball while the defense chases somebody else. Schroeder knows that a juiced-up offense wins games. It’s also just plain fun.
At least on Friday nights in the fall. The rest of the year, football is work. “We were up at six-thirty every morning and in the weight room,” remembers Tom Shaw, a Chaps tailback in 1994 and 1995. “After practice every day, the weight room. We never stopped running and lifting weights.” All the Westlake football coaches are also track coaches, and most players run track. (While many players at rival schools run on cinder, Westlake has a gorgeous, well-maintained Resolite track.)
“There’s a certain standard that I have in the program,” says Schroeder. “And it’s tough. If you were coming here as a freshman, we would get you going on the weights, and some time during your freshman year you would become addicted to weights. And you would go run track. We’d get you out there, run hurdles or some event, get that speed going. Your junior or senior year you’d start filling out and you would be pretty fast from track and pretty strong. You go out and you love to hit. And that’s how you do it in football.”
0F COURSE, THAT’S HOW MOST SCHOOLS DO IT. Westlake simply does it better, and the main reason goes to the heart of why Texas high school football is so exciting. The town of West Lake Hills (estimated population: just under 3,000) has a proud community identity, and the kids want to grow up to be Chaps. They want desperately to play and win for Westlake in the same way kids in Odessa want to win for Permian. “In third grade all I could think of was being able to play for Westlake,” says Dillard. “I went to every game.” Every seat in the stadium is spoken for at every home game, with eight thousand fans screaming at the boys in red, white, and blue. What kid wouldn’t want to play—that is, win—in front of a crowd like that?
Yet West Lake Hills is not your typical small Texas town. Like other suburbs, there’s not much there there, except for the craggy green hills and bluffs that launch the Hill Country. Most of its history concerns cedar choppers getting displaced by upper-middle-class professionals; now it’s known as a pretty place where people with money move. The closest thing to a town square are the fancy strip centers that line Bee Cave Road and the closest thing to a park is Chaparral Stadium. Success—not blood or heritage—is the glue that holds the community together. It’s almost a birthright.
“One of the things about this community is the high expectations it has for its children,” says Hines. “We want you to be successful. We want you to produce.” Ninety-five percent of Westlake’s graduates go on to college. Unlike Permian and other football powerhouses, Westlake has a good academic record, with mean SAT scores (1164) well above those of its counterparts statewide (995) and nationally (1017), five straight “exemplary” ratings from the Texas Education Agency, and few jocks disqualified for bad grades. “Westlake strives for excellence at every level,” says German teacher Scott Gardner. “We don’t accept failure. It’s very, very competitive.” Westlake kids, the ultimate overachievers, learn from the masters: their parents, many of whom are doctors, lawyers, lobbyists, and professors (and football standouts themselves; this year’s varsity team includes the sons of Longhorn football stars Earl Campbell and James Street). “There’s a stereotype that Westlake kids are a bunch of rich kids, that they’re given this, given that,” says Howard Bushong, a former Westlake assistant coach who is now the head baseball coach at Southwest Texas State University. “Let me tell you something: I don’t care what they were handed at home—when they walked out there, they worked their tails off. They wanted someone to push them.”
To get an idea how much, go to the steep ninety-yard hill across the street from the old Anderson High School in predominantly black East Austin on Tuesdays and Thursdays in July. From two to four in the afternoon, in the hellish heat, you’ll see a bunch of mostly white kids running up and down, up and down, at the direction of Carment Kiara, a former track coach at Huston-Tillotson College. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Reagan High School, Kiara has them running sprints and lifting weights. Of the 73 kids in his camp this past summer, 57 were from Westlake. “Their commitment is unbelievable,” says Kiara. “They have the attitude of inner-city kids, like this is the only way out of the ghetto.” The difference is that most of these kids have no trouble affording the $250 fee for the month-long program, just as they can afford to devote their summers to football and, in some cases, working out with personal trainers. Says a former player: “We have cars. No one has to work. All we have to worry about is what supplement to take and what gym to join in the summer.” Boys elsewhere have no such luxuries and no such devotion. “I’ve seen kids from other high schools after two-a-days in worse shape than me,” jokes Olin Buchanan, who covers high school football for the Austin American-Statesman.
Once the Westlake players—in tremendous shape, drilled to perfection, hungry to wear the school colors, and confident to the point of cockiness—are plugged into Schroeder’s offense and defense, the results are almost a foregone conclusion. “It’s not necessarily the personnel,” he says, “it’s the formations and the different things we do. I don’t think our athletes are that much better than other schools’.” But they want it more—and that’s the big difference. Or, as an ex-player puts it, “You face a guy who’s bigger, tougher, and meaner than you, and you know you’re gonna beat him.”
IF WESTLAKE PLAYED LIKE COUNTRY club schools are supposed to and went 2-8 every year, no one would much care about them. “People dislike them because they beat the dog out of everybody,” says Larry Moore, the head coach at Georgetown, the school that, with an 8-14-1 record against Westlake, has beaten them more times than any other (but not since 1989). “I don’t mind being disliked if it’s for winning.” Tommy Cox, the coach at Bowie, who was Schroeder’s boss at Austin’s Travis high school, agrees. “I’d like to be like Westlake and get some enemies,” he jokes.
It’s human nature to hate winners when they play for the other side. And especially when they play for the Dark Side. The Westlake game is circled in red on every team’s calendar, and coaches go wild motivating their kids, perhaps mentioning how embarrassing it would be to lose to a school that does well at effete sports like golf (the Chaps won state last season) and tennis, or how the Westlake parking lot is filled with SUVs and brand-new pickups. “Schools have called us the Caviar-for-Lunch Bunch and the Kids on Cadillac Hill,” says Neptune. “That’s how they get their kids ready to play us. They tell them that we’re rich, that we don’t care about them, that we have very few minorities.”
It helps that the Westlake kids flaunt their gridiron victories like they drive their SUVs: as if they’re entitled to them. “We got cocky as shit,” says one former player, “though I was never cocky until someone acted that way to me.” Their confidence, year in and year out, is infuriating, as if they think they’re better than everybody else; at least on the football field, it’s true. Worse, commoners don’t have the luxury of lording the future over Westlake jocks, most of whom will find themselves, as their parents did, in good universities, fraternities, and high-paying jobs when their glory days are over. At least in Odessa the players have the decency to fall back into pathos, moaning about the way things used to be.
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