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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Some of the ugliest feelings toward the Chaps are racial. Charges of white elitism and outright racism have often hounded Westlake, which is 89 percent white, about 4 percent Hispanic, and less than 1 percent black (the rest of the student body is mostly of Asian descent). The school has only one black faculty member and one black assistant principal out of 235 staff members and not many more Hispanics. Racial tensions have escalated Westlake’s rivalries with Austin schools, especially since a notorious 1989 incident, when LBJ High—which had beaten the Chaps by one point the previous year—visited Westlake for the first time and someone had painted an extremely vulgar racial slur on the visitors’ seats. There were also unsubstantiated rumors: a sign with the words “Nigger Go Home” raised at one point during the game, a black doll hung in effigy the night before, racial slurs yelled at the LBJ band. The resulting media firestorm, especially after Westlake’s then principal said he did not see it as a racial issue and the Eanes superintendent called it a “minor thing,” kept the school in the news for weeks. Eventually three students were suspended for the graffiti and the Chaps were reprimanded by the University Interscholastic League, placed on probation for the next school year, and ordered to come up with a racial-sensitivity plan—one of the first times the UIL had ever disciplined a Texas school for a racial incident. Eanes eventually conducted sensitivity training for teachers and formed committees of students who met with their counterparts elsewhere to talk about race, but the damage was done: In 1991 someone painted “WestlaKKKe” and “White Pride of the Hills” near the entrance to the school.
Many high schools suffer racist students and racial incidents; Westlake, because of its wealth and winning ways, seems to get scrutinized more closely than most. “I think Westlake has been unfairly labeled,” says the Statesman’s Buchanan, who blames a few “knuckleheads.” Georgetown’s Moore agrees. “The race thing has been blown out of shape. Other than the LBJ incident, I’ve never heard of anything.” Bushong, who was coaching at Westlake in 1989, agrees that coverage was sensationalized. “Were there problems? Yes, there probably were. But I didn’t see the same problems others saw. We didn’t care about color.”
To be fair, Westlake is not the only privileged white winner. Most successful 4A and 5A football programs in the nineties have come from mostly white schools in suburbs just outside big cities, many of which are the only high school in the district. “It’s amazing how many state football champions are predominantly white,” says Buchanan, citing Duncanville, La Marque, Katy, Permian, Lewisville, and Plano. But those teams have rarely had to deal with the bitter accusations lobbed at Westlake. Tom Shaw remembers going to a basketball game against a school whose football team had lost to the Chaps that season by fifty points: “They were screaming in my face, ‘Steroids! Steroids!’” Several years ago, a rumor swept through Austin that Westlake coaches were handing out steroids like candy. Today such fictions are accepted as fact by many people. While as many individuals probably take illegal steroids at Westlake as at other schools, the coaches assert their use is not sanctioned. Several former players say the coaches tried to scare them away from steroids with stories of shriveling testicles and threatened to kick offenders off the team.
If anything, all the rancor solidifies Westlake’s bunker mentality, its sense that they’re different out in the hills, that to be a Chap is to be something special. Most teenagers, much less most schools, would die for that feeling—or at least sweat blood for it. No wonder everybody hates them.
“SUCCESS DEMANDS SINGLENESS OF PURPOSE.” “Mental toughness is essential to success.” Vince Lombardi’s clichés are hung in wood throughout the Westlake dressing room, out of time but somehow completely at home. Conspicuously absent is Lombardi’s most famous and intelligible saying: “Winning is not everything. It is the only thing.” That one cuts too close to what many feel is the truth: Westlake strives to win at any cost. Schroeder is all too aware of the perception. “I’m not here to win state championships,” he insists. “I’m here to run a program that provides a positive part of a student’s life.” He talks often of priorities: God first, then family, academics, and finally, football.
Some of his former players aren’t so sure about the sequence. Says one: “That’s not realistic at all. Westlake football is a twenty-four-hour deal. You don’t ever stop thinking about it. The idea of grades being more important than football is a joke.” Another former player, Tom Martindale, who was kicked off the team after killing a woman in a car accident in October 1997, agrees: “There wasn’t any room for anything except for football. It takes everything you’ve got, emotionally and physically.”
It’s impossible to overestimate how much kids want to win or how hard adults will push them. Especially at Westlake. “There is such a wealth of players and so much competition for a limited number of slots that there’s sometimes a callousness to the coaches,” says one father. “The coaches almost have the attitude, ‘My way or we’ll plug in someone else. If you get hurt, we’ll just plug in someone else.”
Most parents, meanwhile, live in their own dream world. Although there’s something noble about moms and dads attending games by the busload, selling antenna balls under the stands for the Chap Club, and eating doughnuts and watching game films with Schroeder on Saturday mornings, their boosterism has a flip side. “There’s definitely this bizarre sports culture among parents at Westlake, this kind of vicarious living through little Johnny that is at once pathetic and somewhat endearing,” says Glenn Brown, a baseball and basketball player who was Westlake’s valedictorian in 1992. “There are all these suburban moms whose primary concerns are really bitchin’ landscaping and what the middle linebacker can squat.”
Not all of the moms and dads are so enthusiastic. “It makes my skin crawl,” says one mother about the 456 Chap Club members who spend so much time and energy cheering Westlake athletes and, some would say, holding delirious expectations for them. “Kids aren’t valued for being kids in Westlake,” says a disgruntled football father, “unless they’re putting trophies in the case.”
IF THERE WAS EVER A SEASON FOR THE Westlake system to work its magic, it’s this one. Schroeder is worried that the Chaps have no returning backfield starters and only one returning offensive starter, tackle Trevor Harrison. The quarterback, Alvin Cowan, is strong-armed but inexperienced. Wide receiver Christian Campbell, Earl’s son and the only black player on the team, is speedy (he placed second in the 200 meters at state last year) but doesn’t seem to relish contact. The other split end, Reid Brees, brother of Drew, is coming off an injury. Certain events of the past two years have also raised eyebrows. In 1997 the Chaps lost in the first round of the playoffs for the first time in the decade. And in 1998 Westlake lost two games in a row for the first time under Schroeder. “I’ve never seen the morale at school so low,” says Westlake senior Eli Kooris.
But Westlake has the good fortune of being in District 14-5A, in which every team but New Braunfels had a losing record last year (the Unicorns went 6-5). The Chaps are picked to win their district easily; Texas Football has them ranked number three in 5A.
And they have the system. It’s white, powerful, and privileged. It’s decked out in red, white, and blue. At the first pep rally of the 1999 season, on August 27, it was fired up—the old gym packed and screaming with hundreds of students, teachers, and parents. The next day Westlake would play Humble in the H-E-B Football Classic in San Antonio’s Alamodome. The seniors, in their first gathering of the year, stood together at one end of the gym and began spontaneously chanting and clapping: “Seniors!” (clap, clap) “Seniors!” (clap, clap). The cheerleaders bounded about like colts; the players, in bright blue shirts, sat on folding chairs at the center of attention with little smiles on their faces. The band played a square version of “Proud Mary” and the sixty Hyline girls danced a routine that was wholesome and awkwardly sexy at the same time. At the end the trumpets blew melancholy and everyone locked arms while they swayed and sang the school song. It was only eight-forty-five in the morning and there were more than a hundred parents at the pep rally. Didn’t they have more important things to do? Well, no.
The next day, in front of a crowd that included three thousand or so Westlake fans who had driven to San Antonio, the Chaps survived a close first half to come on strong in the second and whip a good Humble team, 42—20. Schroeder’s worries about his starters were ill founded. Cowan looked like an heir to Drew Brees, throwing for 312 yards and three touchdowns, two to Reid Brees. Campbell caught three passes for 62 yards. Scott Ballew ran for two touchdowns and Brad Beavan for another. The offense methodically rolled up 422 yards, and the defense swarmed the Humble offense—especially in the fourth quarter, when the Wildcats were exhausted and the Chaps fresh. The Chaps’ backfield footwork looked like ballet, with tackles pulling, backs blocking, and Cowan deftly spinning to roll out the option. It wasn’t football—it was choreography, with each step plotted and designed years ago and run by hundreds of boys ever since.
The system works, as all systems seem to at Westlake—whether they’re designed for winning games or pursuing happiness. Out in the ’burbs, football is life and, residents of Westlake Hills might say, life is like football: Desire and hard work win the day. They can be forgiven for failing to mention how important it is to be born in the right place to the right people. Their urban neighbors are surely never going to let them forget it.
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