This is the second part in a series of three articles detailing the difficulties inner-city programs in Texas face in pursuit of on-field success. Check out the first part here.

 

Before the two state championships, before the renovated school opened and before the Dock that services students in need and the community at large, South Oak Cliff High School was falling apart.

The alumni had been calling to replace the school building, first erected in 1949, since the 90s. But with every bond program the district took on, South Oak Cliff continued to receive minor enhancements. Occasionally, the stage would be painted, or the lockers would get a fresh coat.

By 2015, the air conditioners, the pipes and the electrical wires withered away as maintenance continued to be deferred. Classrooms were subject to the brutal Texas summer heat with no air conditioning to combat it. Needed construction on the roof lagged so far behind that it rained in the building if it rained outside. There were exposed wires students could touch. Students drank out of water fountain molds that hadn’t ever been replaced.

And a football team that had compiled an 18–8 record with multiple playoff wins in Jason Todd’s first two seasons at the helm was doing so despite its athletic facilities.

The grass football field was stationed next to a creek, which meant if it rained, all the water would flood onto the football field and the team would have to complete walkthrough practices on cement or in the basketball gym. The weight room was the same dungeon used under the school since the 70s, with weights older than the athletes were still stuck inside the floor.

In the first year Kyle Ward was the defensive coordinator, the coaches had to bring their trucks and physically move the weight room equipment to Nolan Estes Plaza as workers tried to patchwork areas in South Oak Cliff. Then they had to repeat that process the same summer and move the equipment five miles away to Kincaide Stadium.

And yet, when Dallas ISD’s Bond 2015 program was announced, South Oak Cliff was slated to receive $13 million out of $1.6 billion. The district had allotted 0.8 percent of the money for more enhancements. While Dallas Adamson opened a brand new school and Dallas Sunset added a new wing, South Oak Cliff would remain as it was: a shell of its former self.

With each chance for repair the school district missed, South Oak Cliff began to feel neglect at its worst.

“Because everyone was happy to go to state if SOC went to state,” Derrick Battie said. “Everybody wanted to be in the parade. But you didn’t care when they had to come to a building to do their STAAR test prep that their lights didn’t work, or that their air conditioning imploded and that water just fell flat on the table while they’re doing their test and they got to start over.”

Students began sharing videos of the decaying building on Facebook and Twitter, and it caught the eye of Dallas activist Dominique Alexander, the founder of Next Generation Action Network. Alexander met with senior leaders from the school to form a demonstration voicing disapproval of the 2015 bond program.

That culminated in a 250-person student walkout on Dec. 7, 2015. As news stations flocked

to the school, the cameras zeroed in on one man in his letterman jacket. He spoke for all the high schoolers gathered in the front lawn behind him, holding signs blasting the school’s deplorable conditions.

David Johnson, South Oak Cliff’s First-Team All-Area quarterback and the Metroplex’s top 5A passer as a senior with over 3,000 yards and 44 touchdowns, was pleading with the district to give more money to rebuild a high school and provide benefits to a future generation of students he would never reap.

Staff members knew the students were upset. They saw an increase in students videoing the building as it withered away. But the walkout was executed under their nose, entirely planned and acted upon by senior leaders in South Oak Cliff High School who knew they deserved better.

“A lot of the time, the unpopular thing at one time is going to be a great thing for another time,” Todd said. “It really transpired into something real powerful, seeing him lead along with the other kids. Those kids got out there and marched and protested and wouldn’t back down.”

The students had kickstarted the fight for a new South Oak Cliff independently but needed help finishing the job.

…   

Maxie Johnson hasn’t stopped fighting to bring money back to the Black and Brown community since over 3,000 people elected him in May 2019 to serve on the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees.

He helped oversee Roosevelt High School’s $64-million renovation, which opened in August 2021. The brand-new Pinkston High School opened in January 2022 at a $94.8 million price tag. On March 1, he did a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Albert C. Black Elementary School, which will open its doors in August 2024 and serve one of the toughest areas in his district.

But this journey to rebuild Dallas ISD schools and fight for racial equity began before he was elected. It started seven years ago when his son, David, led the student walkout at South Oak Cliff.

Johnson saw the deterioration of the building firsthand, serving as president of the PTA and the South Oak Cliff Parent Coalition. He grew up in the community, and David would be his third child to graduate from a school that hadn’t received a substantial upgrade since they became the first in the district to integrate in the 60s.

“That’s been the history of Dallas,” Johnson said. “The haves and the have-nots. The haves continue to get, and the have-nots don’t. What we did was we used our first amendment right, and we protested until someone heard us.”

In early February 2015, the district responded to the growing concerns about South Oak Cliff’s building that had culminated in the student walkout by raising the original $13 million allotment to $25 million.

But Johnson, his son and the community knew that wouldn’t be enough. The students hadn’t walked out so South Oak Cliff could receive more Band-Aids. They walked out so their school could be rebuilt. So they continued to fight over eight long months for more money.

The SOC Alumni Bear Cave, led by 1977 graduate Horace Bradshaw, continued attending Dallas ISD Board Meetings to call for more funds. Johnson was also there, representing the Parent Coalition and standing with David, a father and son duo that refused to be denied.

“Several kids spoke at the board meetings to let them know enough is enough,” Johnson said. “That our building is dilapidated, it’s deplorable, it’s beyond life expectancy.”

Slowly, the district began to budge. In April 2016, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa used some of the district’s contingency funds to bring the total to $40 million. But the battle continued well into the 2016 football season.

As the alumni fought for their students in the meetings, the South Oak Cliff football team showed similar resilience on the gridiron. After an 0–3 start in Todd’s first season without David Johnson, the Golden Bears rattled off five consecutive wins for an undefeated district record.

On Oct. 27, one day before South Oak Cliff blew out Samuell 51-28 to improve to 6–3, the Golden Bears earned their most significant victory. In a 6–3 margin, Dallas ISD voted for a $52 million restoration of the school building.

The stunning announcement capped off a period in South Oak Cliff history called ‘The When before the Wins.’ 

“Y’all see us with these wins,” Battie said. “But you weren’t down there at the school board meeting flipping over podiums.”

But South Oak Cliff’s students and staff couldn’t leave school for a winter or summer break and return to the new and improved building without skipping a beat. The entire school needed a new location while a multi-year restoration took place.

So beginning in January 2018, South Oak Cliff moved less than two miles away across I-35 to its temporary home, Village Fair. It was a former shopping center that had morphed into an alternative school for Dallas ISD students with disciplinary issues. There hadn’t been much effort to make it homey. It was supposed to be a punishment if a student was sent there.

South Oak Cliff spent the next two years in a warehouse. 

“They were really long days, and they’re not for the faint of heart,” Ward said.

…   

South Oak Cliff students were used to seeing a new principal every August by the time Dr. Willie Johnson took the job in the fall of 2017. They’d had six of them in six years.

The cycle of rotation at principal played a prominent role in maintenance deferring and academic underachievement that left South Oak Cliff in shambles. Principals needed more time to set their agenda and put their plans in place before they moved on. But Johnson had been hand-picked by the alumni as a Black leader who could provide stability. After all, he was a Golden Bear at heart.

South Oak Cliff was the first school out of college Johnson worked at, serving as the head girls basketball coach, baseball coach and assistant football coach from 1992-2001. And while that experience instilled the SOC spirit within him and taught him how to make do with slim resources, he wasn’t resigned to the idea that this was all the inner city could have. He’d seen what adequate resources could do for a school when he went to college at East Texas State.

But getting South Oak Cliff to the standard he experienced in east Texas would be a monumental task. He inherited a school with an “F” accountability rating according to the Texas Education Agency. Less than 20 percent of the student population met their grade level in the English II and Algebra I STAAR Tests. On top of needing to increase academic expectations, he created transitional plans to move the entire school to Village Fair in January. He mobilized the move over that Winter Break to get all the resources across the highway.

He was working on Christmas Day in 2017. 

“It was like every day was a year to me,” Johnson said.

The coaching staff felt a similar strain.

South Oak Cliff competed in the 2018 and 2019 football seasons while at Village Fair. On paper, they didn’t miss a beat. They compiled a 13–1 district record in two seasons, including an 11–0 start to the 2018 season.

But they didn’t stand a chance once they reached the playoffs and faced suburban schools with an indoor practice facility and a fully stocked weight room on their campus.

Village Fair had one gymnasium. It wasn’t a regulation-size high school gym. It belonged in a church or at the Salvation Army after-school program, complete with thin wood panels slapped down over concrete. That gym also had to serve as the locker room for all the athletic programs, so lockers wrapped around the entire area and made it even smaller. The football team remodeled an old storage unit for their weight room.

Because Village Fair was first designed as a Sam’s Club or Walmart warehouse building, a large parking lot stood where a football field could possibly be. The temporary school South Oak Cliff produced had no coaches’ office or training room.
There was, however, about 80 yards of patchy, uneven grass at the top of the parking lot.

“We made that little grass patch like it was the Super Bowl field,” Todd said.

But they needed an actual field to compete, so every day during spring football practice or the regular season, the team would hop on a bus and trek to one of 12 different fields in the area they could use.

School would start at 8:45 a.m. Kids would get to their athletics period after school, then they’d bus over for their two-hour practice before busing back to Village Fair after dark to eat dinner and go home. If one of the buses was late, which was often, nobody got back home until 10 p.m.  

The coaching staff and talent they’d accumulated could mask the hardships of their smaller building against district schools with their same socioeconomic standing. Those inefficiencies were exposed in the playoffs. In 2018, they lost 28-14 to Aledo, a blue blood program with a 10% economically disadvantaged population. They got shut out in the second round the following year by Frisco.

“That was the impetus of us competing,” Johnson said. “When we got to the playoffs, it was a wide gap.”

…

In March 2021, just over a year after South Oak Cliff moved back into the renovated building, the football team’s Twitter page dropped a three-part series dubbed SOCtv Cribs, a play off the hit reality show MTV Cribs.

The camera follows assistant coach Ellis Wheatfall around the entirety of the new school, panning over all the new features South Oak Cliff now has. There’s the competition gym with fresh paint, the weight room complete with double-digit multi-purpose weight racks and a wall-length mirror lined with dumbbells, and the turf football field with new blocking sleds and three film towers.

Wheatfall stopped in the Legacy Hall and pointed out all the championship trophies lined in glass cases that South Oak Cliff has accumulated over the years. He turned to the camera and clarified they’re ready to add a state championship to the collection.

And they can compete for one with adequate resources for the first time since he got there.

“We said give us five years,” Battie said. “From the time we move back into our building from Village Fair, if you give us five years with the equipment and the field, we’ll be state championship ready.”

SOCtv Cribs is one of several social media projects from South Oak Cliff. They made a video series covering their Top 10 plays of the year, and two-minute interview segments called “Hood Talks” featuring players, staff and even Principal Johnson. All of these marketing campaigns are produced entirely in-house without outsourced funds.

“We’re very active on Twitter,” Todd said. “We don’t bite our tongue. We’re who we are, and I think people respect that to a degree.”

Their Twitter page rivals that of a Division I college football program because that’s what it was modeled after.

Ward was on the football staff at Texas A&M in the 2012 and 2013 seasons during Heisman quarterback Johnny Manziel’s electric run. He saw first-hand how the Aggies became trendsetters at that time on social media, consistently coming up with new graphics and sound effects. Once Ward came to South Oak Cliff, he quickly realized a consistent theme amongst the powerhouse high school programs.

They weren’t investing in social media.

There was an untapped market to highlight high school athletes. Ward knew if the athletes tasted popularity online, they would be driven to work harder and put on a show. So when COVID-19 hit, Ward sat at home like a mad scientist bouncing graphics and video ideas off Juwon Davis, a filmer from Longview who’d chronicled South Oak Cliff’s 2019 season. He learned iMovie and later Adobe Premiere Pro, cutting highlight tapes and graphics to build excitement around the program.

Ward reclines now in the assistant coaches’ office. Off his left shoulder are the two state championship trophies they’ve earned in three years with the new building. South Oak Cliff didn’t need five years with adequate resources to make the title game after all.

The first year in the new building was the COVID-affected 2020 season. South Oak Cliff spent all year breaking in a new quarterback and offensive coordinator who didn’t get to work together during spring football while also dealing with multiple canceled games. That season ended in the second round to Frisco for the second year in a row, this time off a game-winning field goal.

While Jamarion Clark says the Frisco loss put a dagger in many of his teammates' hearts, it spurred the off-season grind that made the 2021 season ahead special. South Oak Cliff was 20 seconds away from advancing, which gnawed at them as they embarked on their first full offseason in their new facilities. 

Stanford safety signee Jimmy Wyrick and fellow graduate Donovan Lewis stopped by the school on multiple occasions over that summer to run drills with and mentor Clark’s defensive back group after conditioning workouts. The sight of alumni investing in South Oak Cliff’s football success even after they’d exhausted their eligibility motivated the rest of the team to follow the defensive backs’ lead and stay longer after practice.

“Now that we know we’re capable, let’s take that next step in working,” Clark said. “Because now, not only is it the defensive backs, it’s the receivers that are catching balls, it’s the offensive line getting extra laps and doing extra steps.”

After a 42-27 loss to Dallas powerhouse Duncanville to open the season, the Golden Bears rattled off 14 consecutive wins to reach the state championship. They defeated all the schools in that run they couldn’t at Village Fair. Frisco was first to fall in the second round, then they beat Aledo 33-28, considered the model program of Texas high school football. Then in the championship, they beat Liberty Hill, a majority white school with a 19 percent economically disadvantaged student population that had been to four title games since 2006.

But Clark kept asking the same question to himself as he stood on that stage at the 2021 parade while his coach bellowed to the cheering South Oak Cliff fans. Todd had always told his team they’d be legends if they did it once. If they did it twice, they’d be immortal.

“How great can we be if we did this one more time before we left?” Clark said. “How can we change the look on inner-city Dallas ISD schools?”

In the 2022 season, they proved they weren’t just a feel-good inner-city story. Instead, they coached new talent to step up after losing District MVP quarterback Kevin-Henry Jennings to SMU and cornerback Kyron Chambers to TCU. After an 0–3 start against three playoff programs in higher classifications, South Oak Cliff gave up just 11.9 points per game in a 13-game win streak. Senior edge rusher Billy Walton III compiled 102 tackles and 18 sacks en route to a District MVP. Tedrick Williams and Danny Green each rushed for over 1,000 yards while the Golden Bears rotated through three different quarterbacks. Senior Malik Muhammad was named the Defensive MVP in the state championship game against Port Neches Grove when his pick-six sealed the 34-24 win.

There’s an instilled belief in this coaching staff, however, that those trophies represent more than the 2021 and 2022 seasons. Sure, social media popularized the SOC brand, and the new facilities gave them an even playing field with the suburban dynasties they were chasing.

But the core identity of this program was molded in the staff’s first few years when they lifted half-broken weights that were rusted entirely, or when construction forced them to move the weight room in pickup trucks across the highway. It was molded at Village Fair when they spent 12-hour days away from home just so they could compete with programs who could get the same objectives done in half that time.

“Those situations made us who we are as a program,” Ward said. “From a coaching staff perspective, we had to find a way.”

Because even with all the new facilities, South Oak Cliff always retained the mentality they forged at Village Fair. The talented class of 2023 seniors who earned the historic second-consecutive state championship didn’t come to South Oak Cliff once the new school was finished. They were freshmen when the school was located at the warehouse across I-35. They’d bought into the vision when the new school wasn’t a reality.

They now leave high school with two state championship rings, 12 Division I scholarships and a place in the history future South Oak Cliff football players will learn.

“I think what we developed here was our grind,” Todd said. “How hard we worked didn’t change by all the things we got later on. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we got a turf field, so now we’re gonna start working hard.’ Hard work had already been implemented long before then, so getting something new, we were still on the same path.”

…

Two sets of banners grab a person’s attention if they walk into South Oak Cliff High School or drive past the front of the building on S Marsalis Ave.

On the left is a massive pennant commemorating the state championship football teams, the signature achievement for an inner-city school in a football-crazed state. But on the right side hang posters from the Texas Education Agency recognizing the school for “Top 25 percent Comparative Academic Growth” in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years.

It’s a message that football and academics have improved together to get South Oak Cliff to the position they are at today, and therefore they’re both honored side-by-side, in equal importance.

Principal Johnson inherited an “F” rated school by TEA standards when he arrived in Fall 2017. The building was falling apart, and they were gearing up for a two-year stint at Village Fair. He says there were less than 900 kids at the school when he took over. Today, the enrollment is at 1,421.

Parents who attended the Mecca are now sending their kids back.

“Everybody wants to be a Bear all over the city,” Johnson said. “That’s a great thing. That lets you know that your work is not taken for granted.”

Yes, the spike in enrollment came because of South Oak Cliff’s football success. Kids want to compete in state championships and practice on a high-end turf football field. But Johnson put those TEA posters on the building for a reason. He wants to highlight that since 2016, 6.1 percent more kids at South Oak Cliff are approaching their grade level in the Algebra I STAAR EOC Test, 14 percent more in Biology, four percent more in English I and 18 percent more in English II.

He’s not naive to the importance of sports at South Oak Cliff and its role in bringing more students to campus. He was a coach at SOC before he was ever the principal. But the banners on the school show that the stigma of a low-achieving school is fading away.

“Athletics is the carriage that brings people here,” Johnson said. “They don’t come here because we have the best U.S. history program. They come here primarily because they want to participate. But it doesn’t have to remain that way.”

Derrick Battie used his athletic prowess in the 90s to earn an athletic scholarship to Temple University, and now he sees this generation of students doing the same thing. Those same kids who started as freshmen at Village Fair are now gearing up for college. Six defensive backs from South Oak Cliff’s 2022 team earned Division I scholarship; three had already completed their high school degree requirements to enroll early. Malik Muhammad is at the University of Texas for spring football, as is Jayvon Thomas at Texas A&M.

When Jamarion Clark was growing up, he used to get laughed at when he told his friends he’d never have to pay for college. Now, he’s just finished his first semester on a football scholarship at Rice with a 3.3 GPA. 

“Some people go to college and they pay to go,” Battie said. “We can take African-American and Hispanic kids and give them full-ride scholarships off our name and our brand athletically.”

South Oak Cliff had already reached the fourth round of the playoffs in 2014 with David Johnson at quarterback before the protest. The bigger fight, Battie says, was for educational equity, safe learning environments, and a facility that could help a community in need.

In the spring of 2021, South Oak Cliff used the newfound space they had from the renovations to help a population disproportionately affected by COVID-19. They used the school as a vaccination site. They partnered with a local non-profit to donate water and gave more than 1,200 meals out of the backs of 18-wheeler trucks to a line of people that extended down the block.  

There’s a responsibility that comes from being referred to as The Mecca.

“We are the beacon of the community,” Johnson said.

That community aspect is why sports are so integral to South Oak Cliff.

Dr. Daniel Bowen, an associate professor of educational administration and human resource development at Texas A&M University, has extensively researched the links between team athletic success and the effect on the overall academic success of the school. In a 2012 study of Ohio schools titled ‘Does Athletic Success Come at the Expense of Academic Success?’, he found that a 10 percent increase in a school’s overall winning percentage was associated with a 1.3 percent increase in the estimate of high school graduation rate and a .25 percent increase in students at or above academic proficiency. In both figures, football had the most considerable impact.

While these data cannot be translated directly to a case-by-case basis, Bowen’s experience as a middle school and high school teacher showed him the profound effects sports could have on both the students and the overall culture of the school. The idea is that sports increase the school’s social capital, and football can have the largest impact because it involves the most students, from the actual team to the cheerleaders, drill team and band.

“If you have more people attending sporting events, talking about adults, kids, you’re fostering and facilitating networks of communication that you otherwise probably don’t have,” Bowen said. “And that tends to be very helpful for pursuits of developing communities that are supportive of adolescents.”

That community was apparent to Dr. Joshua Childs when he stood on the sidelines at AT&T Stadium during South Oak Cliff’s first state championship in 2021. He saw tears streaming down the faces of DISD board members, the superintendent and athletic director’s as the entire South Oak Cliff side elated in pride.

As an assistant professor in the University of Texas’s educational policy and planning program, Childs studies chronic absenteeism and the role of athletics in schools. He has conducted studies examining coaches as extensions of educators and teachers themselves and showed how adults’ role in a student’s life can address the ill effects of chronic absenteeism.

“It’s the same thing you hear athletes talking about how they’d run through a wall for their coach because they know that coach cares for them,” Childs said. “So, I think athletics is that. It’s to give students the opportunity to be a part of something, to feel connected to a school organization, which is super important for getting students to attend school and stay in school.”

That’s why it’s vital to South Oak Cliff’s football players that Jason Todd has been the head coach since 2014, and Kyle Ward has been the defensive coordinator since 2015. The core of South Oak Cliff’s coaching staff has stayed together through the Village Fair years and into the new building, providing a consistency rarely seen in inner-city schools.

South Oak Cliff’s run has exalted them as the pinnacle of what an inner-city football team can be if given the right resources. But while other schools achieved glimpses of the same, such as Austin LBJ’s run to a state championship game in 2021, no one has come close to matching South Oak Cliff’s consistency.

But the model can be replicated elsewhere.

“I think the other part that has been missing over the last two years of their run is that other programs can do this too,” Childs said. “Other programs like us can do this too, and it’s not just going to be the typical suburban, newer school that’s been built because there's a whole new population that’s moved in so they’ve got to build more schools.”