Buchanan brings stability to Aledo

Jimmy Ivey

August 30, 2006 07:15 pm

— Texas high school football can be a contagious addiction which spreads across the Lone Star State every August. In some places, the addiction is not just during football season, it lasts all year long.
When those people are asked what they want more than anything else, many will say a winning season — a state championship, trouncing the rival school for bragging rights. But some just want to have a program which continually breeds success and has stability at the head of the program, a coach who has been there for years and years and has seen it all. For those people, you need only go to Aledo to see that in Tim Buchanan.
Buchanan made his way to Aledo in 1993 after serving as an assistant coach at A&M Consolidated in College Station. Aledo was Buchanan’s first head coaching job.
“It was one of the worst jobs in state of Texas when I came here,” Buchanan said. “They had 17 players playing football in 10th, 11th and 12th grade. It was not the kids’ fault. It was just a bad job. If it had not been, I would not have gotten it. I was 32 years old and had no head coaching experience.
“This year, we have 130, nearly 140 of them 10th, 11th and 12th grade.
“The biggest deal [for the turnaround] is the administration, the school board and the community allowing us to put in a program and supporting our program,” Buchanan said. “I was the fifth head coach in four years. One guy lasted two days. None of them lasted a year. The administration made a commitment, gave me a three-year contract and let me develop a program and that is the biggest difference.”
Since 1993, Buchanan and the Bearcats have won more than 120 games, a state championship, and are now a perennial school in the playoffs. Buchanan has also steered the ship out of 3A and into 4A, a transition that had a lot of people nervous.
“There was a real anxious period,” Buchanan said. “Any time you go from a 3A to a 4A school where you have 900 students in school and you are going to be competing against people who have 1,900, there is a lot of anxiety.
“The biggest deal was our kids have responded to it as a challenge. The last two years in 3A, we lost in the second round. Since we have gone 4A, we have gone at least four rounds, one year to the semifinals.”
Entering his 14th year of coaching the Bearcats, Buchanan’s hopes are high again. A run to the regional finals last year with a team featuring a great deal of youth returns with vaults of experience and a desire to improve, but dreams and just showing up on the field won’t win championships.
“The biggest deal is keeping them positive and keeping improving every week,” Buchanan said. “They are a pretty good looking football team right now, but if they don’t improve on a weekly basis and get better, then by Week 10, everybody is going to be a pretty good football team, or Week 11 everybody is going to be really good football team, or Week 12 everybody is going to be a great football team. If we don’t get better week by week, we won’t be playing Week 11.”