When Donald Hatcher played high school football, his teams treated the pregame locker room like they were soldiers huddled in the tank storming the beach on D-Day. The lights were dimmed, and the players were in their respective lockers, heads back against the cold metal and eyes closed, the only sound their collective hearts pounding louder as they got closer to kickoff.
As the head coach at Austin Anderson, Hatcher’s mentality physically prevents him from being in his team’s pregame locker room. His kids bounce around, ready for a party, not war. Their laughter rattles in his ears – a foreign sound in this sacred space, like a fire alarm at 3:00 a.m. So he escapes outside, staring at the field while fans trickle into the stands. Sooner rather than later, an assistant coach will join him.
“I can’t go in the locker room,” the assistant says.
“Why do you think I’m out here?” Hatcher says.
Hatcher has waited all year for his team to come out flat or, God forbid, lose a game, so he could tell them to shush. But Austin Anderson is 9-0, one win away from the first undefeated season in program history. So Hatcher continues to pace around outside the locker room and out of their way.
Hatcher loves the bond this team has, even if he can’t stand the pregame hubbub it creates. His son, Benjamin, is part of this year’s senior class, the first that Hatcher has coached for all four years of their high school experience. He and others interviewed for this story say that the team’s brotherhood is the biggest reason they’ve done what no one thought they could.
“The brotherhood on this team is something special,” junior quarterback Covert Darbyshire said. “It’s something I’m going to tell my kids about.”
The Class of 2026’s platoon began with 44 players sharing the dream of turning Austin Anderson football into a powerhouse. It’s always the hardest for the first people through the door, and their group only lost three members in the process of kicking it down. Austin Anderson has one ten-win season and one playoff win in school history, both of which occurred in 2010.
“I feel like they’re in the golden age of starting Anderson football,” Hatcher said. “They’ll be the group that got it going.”
Of course, this 2025 team didn’t appear completely out of thin air. Last year, Austin Anderson made the playoffs for the first time since 2016 behind the heroics of now UTSA quarterback Max Gerlich and TCU wide receiver Ed Small. The Trojans led La Porte, who went four rounds deep, 21-20 with six minutes left in the fourth quarter, but allowed 22 unanswered points.
“That’s where you could tell anxiety started to set in,” Hatcher said. “It’s not like the guys didn’t believe, but you could feel the tension of, ‘This could be it.’ This group, they don’t care, they’re going to get their punch in and they’re gonna land it.”
The Trojans don’t play any differently from how they act in the locker room; they’re loose, but all together.
Most of the current team grew up dreaming of donning the blue and gold and doing whatever it took to accomplish it. Darbyshire, the quarterback, had tagged along to all of Austin Anderson’s 7-on-7 tournaments when his older brother was a linebacker. He even played offensive line as a sixth-grader because he was the biggest kid, then bided his time on the sub-varsity team for two years in high school. He knew this team was worth waiting for.
The team had a bond like steel, but it wasn’t an impenetrable wall. Once a newcomer proved their commitment to football, the Anderson family welcomed them with open arms.
Take running back Caleb Crenshaw, for example. The senior had played on Austin LBJ’s varsity team since freshman year. Crenshaw didn’t grow up with dreams of playing at Anderson, but football was always part of his future. His father, Shannon, was a running back at Texas A&M, and Caleb spent his childhood trying to emulate his cousin, Sedrick Alexander. Alexander, now a running back at Vanderbilt, graduated from Austin LBJ as Austin ISD’s all-time rushing (5,286) and rushing touchdowns (75) leader.
This year, Crenshaw has rushed for 1,787 yards and 21 touchdowns. Last week, he usurped Alexander as the AISD all-time touchdown leader and is 140 yards away from breaking the yards record. His goal was to be like Alexander, and now he’s passing him.
“Nobody expected us to be this good this year,” Crenshaw said. “We knew we had the talent and coaches. But nobody else believed in us until we went out there and did it. So we can’t do much talking, we go out there on the gridiron and let our play talk.”
That’s another secret to Austin Anderson’s success: it’s a group that individually feels they have something to prove, playing for a program as a whole that has something to prove. It’s like a compound interest of motivation.
And the team searches for it from any source, including its head coach. Hatcher is part of legendary coach Claude Mathis’s tree, having coached with him at Somerville, Austin LBJ and DeSoto. He inherited Mathis’s fire, too; 15 minutes into practice, something is going to piss him off. Game days are even more intense. If his kickoff team strays an inch from their coverage lanes on the first snap, he’s out at the numbers, letting them hear it.
While he might look like he’s losing his mind in these moments, Hatcher is completely sane. Just like he knows his team plays better with a relaxed pregame locker room, he knows they feed off doubt.
“They make the play and stand up and look at me like, ‘You see?’” Hatcher said. “They want to prove me wrong, and I’m like, ‘You’re proving me right.’”
In a way, Hatcher is having just as much fun as the kids are when they joke around in the moments before kickoff. He just shows it in a different way. He can’t believe the calendar already says Week 10, because it feels like the season just started. A season like this is over before you know it, then sticks with you forever.
He’ll be driven insane for as many more pregame locker room moments as he can get.
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