Resilient Weiss Wolves Enjoy Breakthrough Season

PFLUGERVILLE, Texas — The game clock wound down second by second as the Weiss High School football fans gazed towards the scoreboard at The Pfield. When the time ran out and the final score flashed, they stood and applauded their team’s first-ever playoff win.

As the players unscrewed the white lids off of two large Gatorade coolers, head coach Tommy Aultman strode toward the sea of jumping victors. With his fists raised to the cloudy night sky, Aultman paused under the stream of ice before shaking hands with the opposing coach.

“It was a huge moment for our program,” Aultman told iHSFAN. “Seeing the excitement in our kids … they can walk away knowing they belong.”

There are over 800 high schools in Texas with competing football teams. From small towns to fast-growing cities, thousands of student-athletes represent their schools on the gridiron each year in what is an often romanticized tradition. Some schools have played for over a century, but it took newly built Weiss High School just three years to become bi-district champions.

Under Aultman’s direction, the Wolves overcame the challenges of developing without the guidance of older players. They persisted through a winless first season at the varsity level and embraced Aultman’s message of perseverance. The team’s turnaround season provided a sense of pride and achievement for the new Weiss community that rallied around them.

“Second-year varsity program or not, we feel like we’re just like everyone else at this point,” Aultman said.

But getting to this point was a three-year journey that began when the school opened in 2017.

First, the team needed equipment to practice and train with. That process involved cooperation with Todd Raymond, athletic director for the Pflugerville Independent School District.

“You take things for granted at other places, but you need good attention to detail to get the right amounts of little stuff,” Raymond said. “The visible stuff is the easy part … the little stuff wears us out.”

Aultman needed to hire a staff and build a team identity. So when Aultman picked out his assistants, he said he looked for coaches to instill passion throughout the roster.

“When you build a new program, you feel a tremendous responsibility to the community around you,” Aultman told iHSFAN. “These are decisions to be made that will be around longer than you’ll be somewhere.”

Weiss is located in a diverse and rapidly growing part of East Pflugerville that is home to many military veterans, Raymond said. By placing an emphasis on physicality and fundamentals, Weiss fit into what Raymond described as the storied tradition of Pflugerville high school football.

“You’ve got to stick your head in the ground and pay attention to detail,” Raymond said. “(Weiss) did a good job of representing the blue-collar grind-it-out style.”

But no coaching philosophy works without a strong buy-in from the players.

Gina Brown, assistant principal to the class of 2020, said she worked closely with Aultman and those now-senior players since they were freshmen. In high school, Brown’s class was also the oldest in a newly formed school. She said she used this experience to support those Weiss students who were the oldest in the school for three years.

“A lot of students had concerns about what it would be like,” Brown said. “I told them to take this opportunity and do something with it.”

When Weiss opened, they fielded a junior varsity team made up entirely of underclassmen. They achieved an 8–2 record, flashing their potential while playing a schedule of teams from all over Central Texas, which Raymond said was due to the season coinciding with a district realignment.

Aultman said that during this junior varsity season, the Weiss defensive players began to develop a “nasty attitude” and “played with a chip on their shoulder.”

Aultman and Brown said that the tenacity stems in part from their competitors’ negative perceptions of Weiss as a new school. Many of Weiss’ students were relocated from nearby Hendrickson High School, where Aultman previously served as defensive coordinator and Brown served as assistant principal for the same class.

Brown said that there was an “immediate separation” when the new school boundaries were announced.

“The hardest part for Weiss was pulling kids away from a completely different feeder pattern,” Raymond said. “They were groomed to be a Hendrickson Hawk and now that’s

changing … It’s a different mentality.”

In 2018, the first-ever varsity team at Weiss failed to win a single game, finishing with an 0–10 record. Without a single senior on the roster, the young team was overmatched by an average margin of 24 points per defeat. Weiss mustered just seven total touchdowns on offense and its defense gave up 30 points per game.

“They didn’t have the advantage of older members on the team to gain experience from. They were having to learn it all for themselves,” Brown said of the class of 2020. “They had to grow up a lot faster than their peers in other parts of Central Texas.”

Aultman said that throughout the 2018 season, the players stuck with his message and learned about the toughness that the game demands. But the team was not achieving the results to match their effort.

Brown said that the team’s winless season in 2018 provided the motivational backdrop for their breakthrough in 2019.

“A lot of their peers from other schools didn’t let them forget that they went 0–10 … it was always being thrown in our faces,” Brown said. “A lot of people say to ignore it … I told them to listen to it and do something about it.”

Weiss achieved an 8–2 record in the 2019 regular season. The offense became formidable, and the defense dominated opponents by allowing less than 13 points per game. By every metric, they were the stingiest and most improved defense in their district. As a result, the Wolves qualified for the playoffs and started to gain some attention.

“They (Weiss) are a really good team who does things the right way,” said Brandon Butler, KMAC sports radio broadcaster. Butler provided color commentary and statistics for the Lockhart radio broadcast of their playoff game against Weiss. Butler added that “on paper, you don’t see many weaknesses with Weiss.”

On the morning of that playoff game, Brown said she presented the team with a game ball she had kept from 2018, marked as a reminder of their 0–10 season.

“You always worry about whether things will go to their head,” Brown said of this gameday meeting with the players. “I wanted them to know where we are and remember where we came from.”

In front of their home fans in Pflugerville on Nov. 15, the Wolves executed their game plan against Lockhart and won 24-14.

The Wolves’ season ended Nov. 22 when they lost a close game against Sharyland Pioneer High School in Corpus Christi. Brown said it was hard to watch the seniors clear out their lockers for the last time but that their class will not be soon forgotten.

Aultman said he was proud of the resiliency that the seniors showed and is hopeful for the future of the program that they helped build. As for his own part, Aultman told iHSFAN, “It was a lot of work, but I would do it all over again.”