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ALEDO, TX – There were a thousand things Tim Buchanan wanted to accomplish on his first day as Aledo’s head football coach. It was 1993, and he was a spry 32-year-old with every ounce of boundless energy directed toward rebuilding a struggling program. The question was, what should he do first? Meet the kids? Organize a parent conference? Draft the offseason program?

 The deputy superintendent made his decision for him. And of Buchanan’s endless options, he never would’ve conjured this task up.

 “You need to go down to the stadium and inspect the visitors’ side bleachers,” the deputy superintendent said. 

Inspect? Buchanan was an architecture major at the beginning of college. He’d become a football coach to get out of inspecting structural integrity and start inspecting game film!

“What am I inspecting them for?” Buchanan asked.

“Well, in the last game of the year against Springtown, we had a kid fall through the bleachers.”

“You mean he fell out of the bleachers?”

“Well, no. He fell through them.”

The kid had been jumping up and down, cheering for his team as they reeled off another big play against hapless Aledo, and dropped through the tainted walk boards like a trap door, shattering his arm in the fall. His family was suing the school district. In other words, priority No. 1.

The visitor bleachers had been built by a couple of coaches and the superintendent. They’d driven to the army surplus store, bought a bunch of old army cots, and removed the angle iron frames to make bleachers. By now, the metal had rusted to the point of falling apart. The wooden walk boards had dry-rotted and were pockmarked with holes. And, sure enough, the hole where that kid had fallen through was still there, gaping about two feet wide.

By this point, Buchanan had already met the middle schoolers and their parents at an introductory conference. He thought he remembered Matt Saunders’s dad was an engineer. So he flipped through his middle school roster and called Saunders’s dad. Mr. Saunders walked around the bleachers for about 15 minutes, hands on hips, occasionally squatting for a better look.

“You got any yellow caution tape?” he asked. 

“I mean, I could get some,” Buchanan said. “Why?”

“Because these bleachers are condemned.”

Aledo’s stadium was deemed a hazard zone on Tim Buchanan’s first day on the job, and not for the reasons you’d want as a head coach. It was more dangerous for a fan to watch the game than for any opponent to play against Aledo’s overmatched team. But soon after Buchanan’s last day, that field with the condemned bleachers that poor kids fell through was a mecca of Texas high school football named after its architect.

Tim Buchanan Stadium is a shrine for Aledo’s numerous state records – 12 state championships, 135 consecutive district wins and counting. And now, the house that Buchanan and so many others built will embark upon its final test: 6A football. Because no matter how many trophies these Bearcats stack, the rest of the state has always had one trump card… until now.

“Any time you win the state championship in 5A football, what do the 6A teams say? They go, ‘Yeah, but you couldn’t do that in 6A,’” said Matt Bishop, a three-time state champion as Aledo’s quarterback from 2009-11. “It’s cool to no longer have people be able to doubt you.”

But before you ask whether Aledo is ready for the state’s largest classification – the big dogs, the juggernauts – you must remember where these Bearcats came from. This is the tale of Texas high school football’s greatest dynasty. And what comes next.