Following God’s Path, Not Always His Own
10/23/2018 12:08:00 PM | Football
Longtime High School Coach Thriving in New Role with Baylor Football
By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
You could probably count on one hand – maybe one finger – the number of jobs that would have been attractive enough to lure David Wetzel away from the comfort and stability of San Antonio Reagan High School.
Not only was he the head football coach and athletic coordinator at the Class 6A program, leading the Rattlers to a 13-year record of 114-42 with seven district championships and five state quarterfinal appearances, he was president of the 22,000-member Texas High School Coaches Association.
Honestly, he was entrenched enough and certainly popular enough to eventually retire at that school, and been quite content.
"But, I don't know that that should have ever been in my thought," he said. "I think if we want to grow and improve ourselves, I think there's something about branching out and learning new things and being involved in a new environment and also being able to contribute to something where it needed help."
That's what made Baylor so attractive when he returned to his alma mater to join football coach Matt Rhule's staff nearly two years ago. He was coming home to help.
"I felt very thankful and honored for the jobs I had," said Wetzel, a former walk-on receiver with the Bears (1987-91) who coached in the Texas high school ranks for 25 years before becoming Baylor's Associate AD for Football Relations.
Wetzel, who earned two degrees from Baylor, said he knew "it would be something that would definitely have to be considered" if he ever got the chance to come back.
"When the whole thing came to be, it was more everything fitting at the right time," he said, "which you and I know that that's the Lord's leadership."
Rhule, who also hired two other Texas high school coaches in tight ends coach Joey McGuire and offensive line coach Shawn Bell, said Wetzel has "been so crucial for us in terms of establishing a program and reaching out to Baylor people, former players and people in the Texas high school football community."
"No. 1, he's a tremendous man, a tremendous family man, a great football coach," Rhule said. "He's been on the road for us both years as a recruiter, and has done a great job getting players to feel comfortable about coming to Baylor, because he can talk about it from a first-hand experience."
Thinking back now, as he approaches his 50th birthday in February, David can list off all the times that maybe he had his own plans or ideas but God had a different path in mind.
Coaching, though, was certainly in his blood.
Lloyd Mitchell, David's grandfather, was Cotton Davidson's coach at Gatesville after lettering in football at Baylor and winning the Southwest Conference championship in the discus in 1931. His dad, Grayson Wetzel, made coaching stops at Lampasas, Gatesville, Snyder and Brady before coming to Goldthwaite as the superintendent in 1981.
"I don't think I grew up thinking I was going to be a coach," David said. "It certainly wasn't out of the question, but I don't think I really caught the bug until I was (at Baylor) playing football."
An all-state safety on Goldthwaite's undefeated Class A state championship team in 1985, David was a two-way starter for the Eagles and also played basketball and ran track. Holding a scholarship offer from Angelo State, David said it was a "God thing" that he chose instead to come to Baylor as an invited walk-on.
"I had no clue what that really meant," he said of being a walk-on. "When you play both ways and you feel like you're pretty good at that level, you don't have any idea what you're about to face."
Wetzel was part of an incoming freshman class at Baylor that included Santana Dotson and Robin Jones in the defensive line, running back Anthony Ray, tight end Steve Stutsman and defensive backs Brian Hand, Daniel Morgan and Frankie Smith. The walk-on group also included Hubbard quarterback Blake Anderson, who's now in his fifth year as head coach at Arkansas State.
"I was enamored with getting to lift weights, getting to watch film, getting to have a position coach and really break it down in terms of how things work," he said. "I was eating that up."
Since Cotton Davidson had played for his granddad, the Baylor receivers coach "was kind of like Uncle Cotton," David said. "But, he would jump my butt many a times."
That included a play during one practice when Smith, a nine-year NFL veteran, "drove me straight out of bounds."
"I'm running back to the huddle, and Cotton's chewing me out, saying, 'David, you can't let him force you out of bounds. You're just as good an athlete as him,''' he said. "And I said, 'Now, wait a minute, there's no way I'm as good an athlete as that guy right there.' Of course, Frankie played mine years in the NFL and was a 25-foot long jumper. I got a kick out of that."
Earning a scholarship for his last 2 ½ years, David was able to earn his undergraduate and master's degrees in education and played on the Bears' 1991 Copper Bowl team that was ranked as high as No. 8 nationally. Doing his student teaching at Connally High School the spring before that, he got bit by the coaching bug.
"I got my master's degree, and I would not have done it had it not been for the football part," he said. "I think it was another God thing that I learned that you could have an impact on the people you're around."
With a couple job offers on the table, David's plan was to be the receivers coach under Randy Allen at Abilene Cooper. "They have three church schools (in Abilene), I'll find me a wife there. So, I'm thinking, that's what I'm going to do."
His Baylor coaches had another idea altogether. David still has the card where assistant coach Bill Lane wrote down the contact information for John Beseda at Killeen Ellison High School.
"I'm thinking, 'Why do I want to go to Killeen?''' he said.
Listening to the advice of his Baylor coaches, and maybe a calm voice, David took a job as Ellison's secondary coach and FCA sponsor. The next Sunday, on his first church visit, he met his future wife, Shana, the drill team director at crosstown Killeen High School and a former Kilgore Rangerette.
"Another total God thing," David said. "We met and married in six months. I don't recommend that to a lot of people, that's not great marriage counseling."
Shana, a North Texas grad, also has ties to Baylor and coaching. Her brother and sister both graduated from Baylor, while her uncle, Billy Mills, was an assistant under coach Grant Teaff (1977-82).
David said he "learned a whole lot" in his first game at Ellison, when his secondary got toasted by Round Rock in the '92 season opener.
"That was my indoctrination," he said. "I came in as a college football player, I knew it all. I had all these coverage schemes I was going to put in. I was a hot shot, and I could still do the drills with the kids. I remember sitting down after the game, and one of the older coaches said, 'Hey, Wetzel, it's OK, you're going to learn from this.' And I did.
"I developed that night to be about fundamentals, to be about doing things right, about repetition, about getting the right guys on the field. Not just because they could run fast or looked the part, but they had to be able to make plays, they had to be able to produce. It ingrained in me the philosophy that I used as an assistant coach and I used as a coordinator. I just had to get my butt kicked."
After their first son, Garren, was born in 1994, David asked Shana to move away from her hometown three years later when he was hired as the head coach and athletic director at Hyde Park Baptist School in Austin.
At 28, "I got to be athletic director, the head football coach, and I got to build the weight room, build the locker room, basically build a team," he said. "It was a tough move, but it was a great move for us."
When Killeen ISD was opening two more schools, Shoemaker and Harker Heights, David was all but sure he was going to get one of the head coaching jobs.
Devastated when he was passed over, David got a call from the district with an offer to come help Ken Gray as the defensive coordinator at Shoemaker, a job that lasted two months. When Killeen High coach Lee Bridges left in May, David was asked to take over the Kangaroos.
"It was another God deal," he said, "because I thought I'm going to go back to be the Harker Heights coach or the Shoemaker coach. It was the right one again, and it was the right one because Killeen High School had kind of been left behind. When the new schools were getting built, a bunch of the kids transferred. But, I was in a great place. Those kids wanted to work and they were hungry. I walked into a good situation."
After playoff appearances his first two seasons, "we started seeing a little bit of the school split taking shape in the last two years," he said.
David was the runner-up for the Stephenville High School head job that went to Chad Morris, now the head coach at Arkansas, before taking the Reagan job in 2004. Killeen had actually played Reagan in a home-and-home non-district series, "and I just remember thinking, if that job comes open, that might be one to look at."
When it did, David called Teaff, his former head coach at Baylor, whose grandson was playing for the Rattlers at the time. He told him it was a good place, "but you'll have to change their mentality."
"We moved down there without really knowing a lot of people, but going to a place we thought we were supposed to be," David said. "That first year was tough, tough, tough. That's why I think I can tell guys like Matt (Rhule), sometimes you've just got to weather the storm that first year and get through it. And I learned a lot.
"After that first year, I can't say enough good things – the people there, the kids there. We had our challenges, just like everybody, but we were able to win a lot of football games, we had a really good program. We just couldn't ever go win a state championship, but we had some really good teams and we were close."
David also got the chance to coach all three of his sons, Garren, Skyler and Chase, but his oldest son gave up football after some serious injuries and switched to the FFA program at Madison High School.
"I tell people all the time, you may want your kid to be a whatever, but God may have a different plan," David said. "We made a lot of mistakes as parents, but if there's anything we did right, we let him go do what he was built to do. He got his agriculture degree from Tarleton, and they hired him to be the agriculture foreman on the farm there."
Skyler is a redshirt sophomore running back at Tarleton, where the Texans are 7-0 and the eighth-ranked team in the country in Division II.
"He wants to coach, and I'm in a position to help him with that. I've got some connections," David said of Skyler, who could potentially graduate in May. "He's going to do that on his own. But, I always tell dads, it doesn't hurt for you to open the door for them. They still have to walk through it, but you can at least open the door."
The door opened in December 2016 for David and his family to come to Baylor. With the rest of the family on board with the move, David was still worried about his youngest son, Chase, who had just finished his freshman season at Reagan.
"I found him in the hallway and said, 'Hey, Coach offered me a job,''' David said of Chase, who's now a junior defensive back and holder for the Midway High School football team. "And Chase said, 'Dad, I prayed about it, and I think you should take it.'''
Although he no longer coaches on the field, David handles high school relations, has been an on-the-road recruiter each of the last two years and has taken on administrative duties with football travel this year.
"I'm way more relaxed, because I don't feel like I'm bearing the brunt of making every decision," he said. "When you're the head guy, you're responsible for every decision. That's where I can be of help to Matt and be somebody he can lean on. So, I'm at peace. Now, if he said go coach whatever, I think I could do it. But, there would be some soul-searching in terms of what I need to be doing and should be doing in the long term."
Shana has been there by his side at every stop – Killeen, Austin, back to Killeen, San Antonio and now Waco.
"Shana has been the ultimate coach's wife," David said. "I think when people have issues, coaching-wise, it's not because they can't coach, it's possibly because they don't have the support at home. She is an unbelievable coach's wife. I think she values what football does for young men. Through all my 25 years as a high school coach, she never asked me when I was coming home. That's a big deal, because I know a lot of guys get asked that. She's been extremely supportive of me and our boys."
Baylor Bear Insider
You could probably count on one hand – maybe one finger – the number of jobs that would have been attractive enough to lure David Wetzel away from the comfort and stability of San Antonio Reagan High School.
Not only was he the head football coach and athletic coordinator at the Class 6A program, leading the Rattlers to a 13-year record of 114-42 with seven district championships and five state quarterfinal appearances, he was president of the 22,000-member Texas High School Coaches Association.
Honestly, he was entrenched enough and certainly popular enough to eventually retire at that school, and been quite content.
"But, I don't know that that should have ever been in my thought," he said. "I think if we want to grow and improve ourselves, I think there's something about branching out and learning new things and being involved in a new environment and also being able to contribute to something where it needed help."
That's what made Baylor so attractive when he returned to his alma mater to join football coach Matt Rhule's staff nearly two years ago. He was coming home to help.
"I felt very thankful and honored for the jobs I had," said Wetzel, a former walk-on receiver with the Bears (1987-91) who coached in the Texas high school ranks for 25 years before becoming Baylor's Associate AD for Football Relations.
Wetzel, who earned two degrees from Baylor, said he knew "it would be something that would definitely have to be considered" if he ever got the chance to come back.
"When the whole thing came to be, it was more everything fitting at the right time," he said, "which you and I know that that's the Lord's leadership."
Rhule, who also hired two other Texas high school coaches in tight ends coach Joey McGuire and offensive line coach Shawn Bell, said Wetzel has "been so crucial for us in terms of establishing a program and reaching out to Baylor people, former players and people in the Texas high school football community."
"No. 1, he's a tremendous man, a tremendous family man, a great football coach," Rhule said. "He's been on the road for us both years as a recruiter, and has done a great job getting players to feel comfortable about coming to Baylor, because he can talk about it from a first-hand experience."
Thinking back now, as he approaches his 50th birthday in February, David can list off all the times that maybe he had his own plans or ideas but God had a different path in mind.
Coaching, though, was certainly in his blood.
Lloyd Mitchell, David's grandfather, was Cotton Davidson's coach at Gatesville after lettering in football at Baylor and winning the Southwest Conference championship in the discus in 1931. His dad, Grayson Wetzel, made coaching stops at Lampasas, Gatesville, Snyder and Brady before coming to Goldthwaite as the superintendent in 1981.
"I don't think I grew up thinking I was going to be a coach," David said. "It certainly wasn't out of the question, but I don't think I really caught the bug until I was (at Baylor) playing football."
An all-state safety on Goldthwaite's undefeated Class A state championship team in 1985, David was a two-way starter for the Eagles and also played basketball and ran track. Holding a scholarship offer from Angelo State, David said it was a "God thing" that he chose instead to come to Baylor as an invited walk-on.
"I had no clue what that really meant," he said of being a walk-on. "When you play both ways and you feel like you're pretty good at that level, you don't have any idea what you're about to face."
Wetzel was part of an incoming freshman class at Baylor that included Santana Dotson and Robin Jones in the defensive line, running back Anthony Ray, tight end Steve Stutsman and defensive backs Brian Hand, Daniel Morgan and Frankie Smith. The walk-on group also included Hubbard quarterback Blake Anderson, who's now in his fifth year as head coach at Arkansas State.
"I was enamored with getting to lift weights, getting to watch film, getting to have a position coach and really break it down in terms of how things work," he said. "I was eating that up."
Since Cotton Davidson had played for his granddad, the Baylor receivers coach "was kind of like Uncle Cotton," David said. "But, he would jump my butt many a times."
That included a play during one practice when Smith, a nine-year NFL veteran, "drove me straight out of bounds."
"I'm running back to the huddle, and Cotton's chewing me out, saying, 'David, you can't let him force you out of bounds. You're just as good an athlete as him,''' he said. "And I said, 'Now, wait a minute, there's no way I'm as good an athlete as that guy right there.' Of course, Frankie played mine years in the NFL and was a 25-foot long jumper. I got a kick out of that."
Earning a scholarship for his last 2 ½ years, David was able to earn his undergraduate and master's degrees in education and played on the Bears' 1991 Copper Bowl team that was ranked as high as No. 8 nationally. Doing his student teaching at Connally High School the spring before that, he got bit by the coaching bug.
"I got my master's degree, and I would not have done it had it not been for the football part," he said. "I think it was another God thing that I learned that you could have an impact on the people you're around."
With a couple job offers on the table, David's plan was to be the receivers coach under Randy Allen at Abilene Cooper. "They have three church schools (in Abilene), I'll find me a wife there. So, I'm thinking, that's what I'm going to do."
His Baylor coaches had another idea altogether. David still has the card where assistant coach Bill Lane wrote down the contact information for John Beseda at Killeen Ellison High School.
"I'm thinking, 'Why do I want to go to Killeen?''' he said.
Listening to the advice of his Baylor coaches, and maybe a calm voice, David took a job as Ellison's secondary coach and FCA sponsor. The next Sunday, on his first church visit, he met his future wife, Shana, the drill team director at crosstown Killeen High School and a former Kilgore Rangerette.
"Another total God thing," David said. "We met and married in six months. I don't recommend that to a lot of people, that's not great marriage counseling."
Shana, a North Texas grad, also has ties to Baylor and coaching. Her brother and sister both graduated from Baylor, while her uncle, Billy Mills, was an assistant under coach Grant Teaff (1977-82).
David said he "learned a whole lot" in his first game at Ellison, when his secondary got toasted by Round Rock in the '92 season opener.
"That was my indoctrination," he said. "I came in as a college football player, I knew it all. I had all these coverage schemes I was going to put in. I was a hot shot, and I could still do the drills with the kids. I remember sitting down after the game, and one of the older coaches said, 'Hey, Wetzel, it's OK, you're going to learn from this.' And I did.
"I developed that night to be about fundamentals, to be about doing things right, about repetition, about getting the right guys on the field. Not just because they could run fast or looked the part, but they had to be able to make plays, they had to be able to produce. It ingrained in me the philosophy that I used as an assistant coach and I used as a coordinator. I just had to get my butt kicked."
After their first son, Garren, was born in 1994, David asked Shana to move away from her hometown three years later when he was hired as the head coach and athletic director at Hyde Park Baptist School in Austin.
At 28, "I got to be athletic director, the head football coach, and I got to build the weight room, build the locker room, basically build a team," he said. "It was a tough move, but it was a great move for us."
When Killeen ISD was opening two more schools, Shoemaker and Harker Heights, David was all but sure he was going to get one of the head coaching jobs.
Devastated when he was passed over, David got a call from the district with an offer to come help Ken Gray as the defensive coordinator at Shoemaker, a job that lasted two months. When Killeen High coach Lee Bridges left in May, David was asked to take over the Kangaroos.
"It was another God deal," he said, "because I thought I'm going to go back to be the Harker Heights coach or the Shoemaker coach. It was the right one again, and it was the right one because Killeen High School had kind of been left behind. When the new schools were getting built, a bunch of the kids transferred. But, I was in a great place. Those kids wanted to work and they were hungry. I walked into a good situation."
After playoff appearances his first two seasons, "we started seeing a little bit of the school split taking shape in the last two years," he said.
David was the runner-up for the Stephenville High School head job that went to Chad Morris, now the head coach at Arkansas, before taking the Reagan job in 2004. Killeen had actually played Reagan in a home-and-home non-district series, "and I just remember thinking, if that job comes open, that might be one to look at."
When it did, David called Teaff, his former head coach at Baylor, whose grandson was playing for the Rattlers at the time. He told him it was a good place, "but you'll have to change their mentality."
"We moved down there without really knowing a lot of people, but going to a place we thought we were supposed to be," David said. "That first year was tough, tough, tough. That's why I think I can tell guys like Matt (Rhule), sometimes you've just got to weather the storm that first year and get through it. And I learned a lot.
"After that first year, I can't say enough good things – the people there, the kids there. We had our challenges, just like everybody, but we were able to win a lot of football games, we had a really good program. We just couldn't ever go win a state championship, but we had some really good teams and we were close."
David also got the chance to coach all three of his sons, Garren, Skyler and Chase, but his oldest son gave up football after some serious injuries and switched to the FFA program at Madison High School.
"I tell people all the time, you may want your kid to be a whatever, but God may have a different plan," David said. "We made a lot of mistakes as parents, but if there's anything we did right, we let him go do what he was built to do. He got his agriculture degree from Tarleton, and they hired him to be the agriculture foreman on the farm there."Skyler is a redshirt sophomore running back at Tarleton, where the Texans are 7-0 and the eighth-ranked team in the country in Division II.
"He wants to coach, and I'm in a position to help him with that. I've got some connections," David said of Skyler, who could potentially graduate in May. "He's going to do that on his own. But, I always tell dads, it doesn't hurt for you to open the door for them. They still have to walk through it, but you can at least open the door."
The door opened in December 2016 for David and his family to come to Baylor. With the rest of the family on board with the move, David was still worried about his youngest son, Chase, who had just finished his freshman season at Reagan.
"I found him in the hallway and said, 'Hey, Coach offered me a job,''' David said of Chase, who's now a junior defensive back and holder for the Midway High School football team. "And Chase said, 'Dad, I prayed about it, and I think you should take it.'''
Although he no longer coaches on the field, David handles high school relations, has been an on-the-road recruiter each of the last two years and has taken on administrative duties with football travel this year.
"I'm way more relaxed, because I don't feel like I'm bearing the brunt of making every decision," he said. "When you're the head guy, you're responsible for every decision. That's where I can be of help to Matt and be somebody he can lean on. So, I'm at peace. Now, if he said go coach whatever, I think I could do it. But, there would be some soul-searching in terms of what I need to be doing and should be doing in the long term."
Shana has been there by his side at every stop – Killeen, Austin, back to Killeen, San Antonio and now Waco.
"Shana has been the ultimate coach's wife," David said. "I think when people have issues, coaching-wise, it's not because they can't coach, it's possibly because they don't have the support at home. She is an unbelievable coach's wife. I think she values what football does for young men. Through all my 25 years as a high school coach, she never asked me when I was coming home. That's a big deal, because I know a lot of guys get asked that. She's been extremely supportive of me and our boys."
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