STEPHENVILLE, TX — Sterling Doty has a secret. A little-known trivia fact he wouldn’t dare let slip in Stephenville, Texas, where football is a religion and church is held on Friday night, cheering on the Yellow Jackets. 

Basketball was actually his first love.

The Doty family moved to Stephenville in 1994. Sterling was in sixth grade, and his older brother, Jay, was in seventh. On the first day of middle school, Jay told the secretary handing out his schedule that he planned to skip football and stick with basketball. The secretary glanced at both boys – the sons of a rodeo coach, country-strong from years of calf roping and steer wrestling under their father’s watchful eye. "Hang on a minute," she said, dialing Bob Cervetto, the junior high athletic coordinator.  

“Coach Cervetto came up there,” Doty said. “And, sure enough, he made a football player out of my brother real quick.”

In Stephenville, football chooses you. Everyone in this town is a Yellow Jacket, whether a player, coach, parent, or cheerleader. They move as one, flying from city to city to beat your favorite team until they’ve migrated to AT&T Stadium for the state championship, their buzz the cacophony caused by shaking the ball bearings inside painted propane tanks. It is impossible not to become part of the swarm. Oftentimes, it’s also impossible to move on.

“We have so many kids that could go play college football, and a lot of them get to the end and go, ‘Coach, I’m happy with being a Stephenville Yellow Jacket the rest of my life,’” Stephenville defensive coordinator August Dobraski said.

In that sense, Sterling Doty has lived out every Stephenville boy’s dream. His football induction came on the first day of sixth grade. Five years later, he and his brother started on the offensive line for back-to-back state championships under Art Briles. Twenty years later, Stephenville chose him again, this time as its head football coach. 

“I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go back to the place that influenced me and my wife,” Doty said. “There’s no better place to raise a family than Stephenville.”

There’s also no place with higher expectations and greater pressure. Doty’s not naive enough to believe the pressure will deflate after a perfect 16-0 state championship season. Four years ago, moments after Stephenville’s parade for the 2021 title team, a prominent community figure ambled up to Doty to shake his hand.

“Coach, congratulations,” he said. “Now, we get to see what kind of coach you really are.” 

Stephenville football operates like a hot air balloon. The rabid fanbase’s support and expectations light the fire that turns boys into men, a pressure that propels them to new heights season after season, like shutting out Kilgore in one of the best defensive performances in state championship history. From the ground, the balloon takes a peaceful climb into the sky. But Sterling Doty is the frantic pilot inside that basket, a barrier between the community’s fire and the players’ airspace.  

Doty may be the head coach, but this is not his program – it’s the community’s. He is the steward, a willing, able, and fiery pilot. Not only does he have an entire town to answer to, but everyone in the town feels like they know him intimately. He and his wife both attended the school. Both their parents still live in Stephenville. He’s coaching kids whose parents he sat next to in class, whose dads he went through offseason boot camp with, whose grandparents hosted him for playdates. How cool it must be to know the athletic director of the town’s pride and joy on a first-name basis – and have his phone number to remind him of it.   

“I can’t imagine how it is for Coach Doty,” Dobraski said. “There’s always somebody wanting his time and wanting to speak with him. For me, I get it a little bit, but I can’t imagine how it is being him, being from here.”

But his alumni status is also his greatest strength as a head coach. If a young man’s first superhero is their father, how hard will he go for the coach who their dad vouches for as ‘one of us’? How can a kid with dreams of winning a state title not hang on his every word when the championships he helped win are memorialized on the fieldhouse wall?

“You’ve got these kids who are like, ‘Hey, my dad played with this guy,’” Stephenville offensive coordinator Kolt Kittley said. “It’s almost like a built-in respect. He’s been here. He’s won state championships here. He’s been through the program. He understands what Stephenville is about.”  

Doty also understands he is a small but important part of the Stephenville football machine. He has now won two state championships as a player and two state championships as a coach. And yet, Stephenville has won championships before him. One day, he hopes somewhere in the distant future, they’ll do so without him, too. No pilot is bigger than the balloon. But no one understands the balloon like the pilot, either.  

He knew the job he was taking back in 2019. He sold his top two assistants at Magnolia High School, Kittley and Dobraski, on coming with him by describing the championship pedigree. But he also warned them that not everyone could handle what comes with it. Some of the coaches on Magnolia’s staff declined the chance to go to Stephenville. They tried to convince Kittley to stay, too, maybe even put his name in the running for head coach. He didn’t want all that pressure, right?  

“If you’re at some place that doesn’t have that pressure, you’re probably not at a place that has the chance of winning it all,” Kittley said.

But, in the first couple of years of Doty’s tenure, Stephenville wasn’t really that close. The Yellow Jackets had back-to-back six-win seasons, and football season was over by Thanksgiving. The team was talented, but not deep. Six athletes played on both sides of the ball, and Doty still had to call up six sophomores in 2020. 

In 2021, the Yellow Jackets began the year ranked No. 19 in the state. They didn’t really know how good they could be until they throttled Waco La Vega, 35-7, in the first game of district play. That win kick-started a storybook run to the state championship against Austin LBJ, where the defense forced six turnovers. Stephenville could do no wrong that day. Even when Austin LBJ got an interception, Stephenville wide receiver Coy Eakin punched the ball out from behind, and it floated into Kallan Kimbrough’s arms for a touchdown.

But the confetti hadn’t even hit the AT&T Stadium turf before the team – and the town – fixated on the next one. It was Stephenville’s first state championship since 2012, a blink of an eye for most programs, but a drought for the Jackets. A sip of water doesn’t satisfy your thirst in the desert. You need more water.  

For the next three years, Stephenville was a preseason top-five team. Even now, Doty believes they had the program and talent to win state. But they came up just short every year. Part of it was untimely injuries. Part of it was unlucky bounces. But part of it, and who knows how much, was the pressure.  

“When we won in 2021, there was so much pressure of, ‘How are we going to do it again next year?’” Dobraski said. “As players and coaches, I think we let that kind of overwhelm us.”

The 2025 team had all those same expectations, but it had too much experience to break under them. Stephenville averaged 44.4 points per game and allowed just 8.9, the most dominant year in school history by point differential.

The defense was loaded with three-year starters who entered the year with 28 games of varsity experience: defensive tackle Kolton Dearth, defensive end CJ Spellmeier, and the linebacker tandem of Hudson Butchee and Caleb Taylor. On offense, quarterback Trot Jordan was named the Class 4A DI Padilla Poll Offensive Player of the Year, throwing for 3,241 yards and 45 touchdowns, and RB Zyler McClendon earned First Team All-State honors, all behind a stout offensive line captained by Cooper Doty, Sterling’s son.

Remarkably, the Yellow Jackets were just as dominant in the classroom as they were on the football field. All 53 members earned Academic All-District honors, and the team maintained a 4.0 GPA. 

This offseason has been full of reminders of how special last season was. There’s the team banquet, the ring presentation, and even Dearth’s Whataburger SuperTeam presentation.   

“I think you appreciate more of what you just accomplished because of the years that you didn’t win it, because you know all of the things that have to go right,” Doty said.

But something gnaws at Stephenville’s head coach. He finds himself caught between two years, celebrating the past and gearing up to defend it. People associate Doty’s high school years with the revolutionary Briles Air Raid offense. But he knows those teams won state championships because of their offseason weight room program. Frankly, this is the most important time of the year in determining what kind of team Stephenville will be next year. 

That’s why, every day before dawn when his alarm clock blares, he bounds out of bed. As he scrubs his face, his mind’s already on the upcoming athletic period and how he can do right by this next group of seniors. And when he pats himself dry and looks up, he realizes the expectations in Stephenville haven’t been what’s driving him this whole time. 

“The most pressure you get is from the man you look in the mirror to,” Doty said.