It was Christmas Eve 2024, but Eddie Salas had given up on sleeping hours ago. Instead, he stared at his bedroom ceiling, wondering how many more Christmas mornings he’d share with his family.

He’d received a Large B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis that afternoon. The doctors had found eight different spots on his bones. It was fast-growing. Aggressive. Stage IV.

But Eddie’s own life wasn’t flashing before his eyes; it was his older brother's.

Juan’s birthday was tomorrow. This would be the 15th year he wasn’t there to celebrate it as he passed away on June 7, 2010 at 37 years old. He’d been diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. He was not a smoker or drinker. Doctors said it had been slow-growing for years. It could’ve been due to the high-hazard industry he worked in, maybe exposure to asbestos and mold. Or it could’ve been growing since birth. One of the cruelest parts of cancer, as Eddie had just found out, is how random the disease is. Sometimes, the best people get dealt the worst hand.

Eddie had a severe case of little brother syndrome. He wanted to do everything Juan did, but better. In fact, Eddie owed his career as the head football coach at San Antonio Harlan to Juan for introducing him to the game. 

Juan underwent treatment at MD Anderson in Houston. But when the cancer became incurable, he moved back to Schertz to spend the rest of his life with family. Eddie was coaching at Boerne at the time. Every Monday after afternoon practice, Eddie would drive to Houston to get Juan’s medicine, arrive at the hospital at 9:00 p.m., and then drive back to the San Antonio area. 

Juan fought every day until his last. But Eddie’s final memories are of his hero wounded, slumped over in pain on the couch. He associated those images with cancer, a disease that takes and takes. It took his brother’s health, then his life. It took all of his parents’ time as they cared for him, then their child. 

Cancer affects a wide net of people around the person who contracts it. Eddie now feared it had ensnare his wife, Abbey and children Mia (20 years old), Ethan (13) and Ava (6).

He could feel his wife’s eyes on him, lying beside him in bed. 

“I can’t raise the kids without you, you know,” she said.

She was giving the football coach his own pump-up speech. That bedroom was the pregame locker room. The fear was gone. Eddie Salas was ready to run through a brick wall – and into the game of his life.

“You’re not going to have to,” he said.

The next morning, Salas prepared his kids for the battle they would witness. It’d look like he was getting his ass kicked. He’d lose his hair. He’d have to wear a mask because of a weakened immune system. He’d have to sleep more during the day. But he promised them that he would fight every second of every day. 

Since December 2016, his fight had been building San Antonio Harlan’s program as its inaugural football coach. Now, his fight was cooking dinner for his family and cleaning the house. Every morning, he walked his daughter to the bus stop. He’d missed much of her formative years while starting Harlan’s football team. But he got to make up for lost time with each trip to the bus stop. That was one silver lining of the wretched illness.   

“I wanted to keep living life the way I would, because I wanted my kids to see that you don’t just quit. You put the outcome on God’s plan.”

Salas grew up in a religious household. Juan even played guitar in the worship band. But he never prayed like he has since he was diagnosed with cancer, seeking and speaking to God every second of every day instead of once at night. He believes life’s valleys lead to the most spiritual growth. 

Pete Padilla, the current head coach at San Antonio Holmes, is one of Salas’s lifelong friends and the godfather of his youngest daughter. He rode shotgun for every Monday trip to MD Anderson and back. They opened up Harlan High School together and spent six months in a portable classroom mapping out the future of the football program. Padilla says that Salas’ faith didn’t just get him through suffering; it gave him meaning in suffering.

“One of the things I remember is everybody talking to him like, ‘Hey, I’m going to pray for you,’” Padilla said. “I remember one thing he said, ‘Maybe this is about helping people get closer to God.’ I thought that was such a profound statement. That in all the hurt and things he was going through, he always found God and put Him first.”

After Eddie gave a speech at Juan’s rosary, Padilla joked with Eddie that he might’ve missed his calling as a minister. He didn’t come from a football family, but his family’s work ethic led him to football.

Salas’s father, Juan Sr., worked in room service, banquets and private dining at beautiful hotels in San Antonio like Omni La Mansión and Hotel Valencia. But when a teenage Salas visited, he believed his father owned the hotel because of how everyone spoke about him. The San Antonio Spurs used to stay there, and Salas got autographs from Hall of Famer David Robinson because the team requested that Juan Sr. serve them. 

Because his parents both immigrated from Mexico after third grade, Salas’s mother, Maria, raised him with a third-grade education. But when Salas went to college, so did Maria. She earned her nursing degree from San Antonio College. 

Salas learned that titles didn’t matter; what mattered was becoming the best at any title you were given. 

In his first meeting with then-Harlan principal Robert Harris after he got the job, Salas took off his gameday visor and held it out so Harris could examine the logo. There was no insignia of “Harlan”, just a hawk’s head. 

“One day, when I’m somewhere out of town, somebody will recognize this hat and say, ‘Hey, Harlan High School,’” Salas said. “And I’m going to come back and tell you, ‘We made it.’”

That recognition would mean he’d built Harlan into one of Texas high school football’s household brands, like Austin Westlake or Allen. This would be his marker for being the best at everything he did, just like his parents showed him.  

Four years into the gig, he went on a fishing trip with buddies in Port O’Connor. His group stopped at a convenience store at 4:30 a.m. to load up on supplies. As he was checking out, a pastor from another fishing crew saw the hawk head on Salas’ hat.

“Harlan High School,” he said. “Are you the head coach there?”

The Harlan Hawks have spread their wings across San Antonio. Salas has coached the team to three straight double-digit win seasons. Last year’s 12–2 run was the deepest in program history. Now that more people than ever are recognizing the hawk head, Salas is focusing on what they’re recognizing it for. 

“I don’t think Jesus is going to ask me about all my wins,” Salas said. “But, certainly, He’s going to ask me about all the lives I helped transform.”

Salas has built this program on the core foundations of faith and fight, and he lived that out in his cancer battle. 

Salas underwent four treatments of R-CHOP chemotherapy, which stands for a combination of the six different drugs the doctors give you. When he arrived for the first session, the nurses expected to meet the frazzled man that Salas had been on the day of the diagnosis.

“I bet you didn’t sleep much last night,” the nurse said. “Most people come in here and they’ve been up all night worrying.”

Salas told her he slept great. The first night, he stared at the ceiling. Every night since, he’d entered the sound sleep of a man who knows he has no control over tomorrow.

“I serve a higher God who doesn’t want me worrying about stuff,” Salas said.

Salas is in full remission, yet he is forever altered by the cancer battle. This Saturday, his team faces No. 20-ranked San Antonio Brennan in a high-profile district matchup. There will be more eyes on his brand. More importantly, there’ll be more eyes on his story.

Maybe his friend Padilla was right, and Salas did miss his calling as a minister. But Salas insists coaching the San Antonio Harlan Hawks is his ministry. He can bring people closer to God on the football field just as well as the church.