Steven Ortiz is the head athletic trainer at Midland Legacy High School, but physical rehabilitation plans aren’t the only thing he maps out. Ortiz also fixes the team’s travel schedule - from the time they leave to where they get food - for all the Rebels’ road games. 

When he first saw Midland Legacy’s 2025 football schedule, which included a more than two-hour bus ride for six of the first seven games, Ortiz wondered what he’d done to piss off head coach Clint Hartman.

“I thought Coach Hartman really just didn’t like me at that point,” Ortiz joked. “My wife was like, ‘Did you do something wrong that we have to travel this much and you’re never going to be at home?’”

Midland Legacy’s first three games were on the road at Allen, Euless Trinity and Lake Travis. After a home game against Abilene, the Rebels played a neutral-site game against Ruston High School (Louisiana) in Alvarado. All told in that first month, Midland Legacy traveled 2,617.6 miles round trip, which is nearly the equivalent of driving from Los Angeles, California, to Washington, D.C. But the journey doesn’t stop there. Midland Legacy’s first two District 2-6A games, last week against San Angelo Central and this Friday against Wolfforth Frenship, are both over a two-hour bus ride away. 

Which begs the question: Is Coach Clint Hartman a madman? 

Midland Legacy’s spread-out district is a product of the sparser West Texas populations. The six teams in District 2-6A, which hail from the cities of Midland, Odessa, Wolfforth and San Angelo, are the only high schools within a 200-mile radius that qualify for the state’s largest classification. 

But the far-out non-district schedule is part choice and part necessity. 

Since non-district games do not count toward playoff seeding, coaches use two schools of thought in scheduling: face a perennial power to expose where you must improve come November, or a likely win to build momentum. Hartman prefers the former because his team has won at least a share of the district title in six of the last seven years. He says an increasing amount of teams prefer the latter. 

“Where things have changed in my 20-plus years, we have teams that are looking for wins,” Hartman said. “When they look for wins, they look for private schools. Then I’ve got to be playing a team in Louisiana.  I’m not against private schools, but they chose to be private. All the private schools need to play each other.” 

Hartman is right that games between private and public schools are becoming more regular. Argyle Liberty Christian, the back-to-back TAPPS Division I Champions, played four public school programs in its first five games. The Warriors do have a Baylor commit at quarterback (Quinn Murphy) and a five-star two-way player (Cooper Witten), so it’s safe to say neither they nor the public school they faced was looking for an easy win. Some programs, however, do. 

But there are other clear reasons a program closer to Midland Legacy wouldn’t schedule the Rebels. Some non-district opponents the program faced in the past, such as Amarillo, Amarillo Tascosa and Belton, are in Class 5A. Not only would they have to play a larger team, they’d have to play a historic program. 

All these factors leave Midland Legacy with little choice but to fire up the bus and take a Rebel Road Tour of Texas. 

That’s where Ortiz and his training staff come in. The group, along with volunteers like Jake Decker and Larry Hall, the fieldhouse’s namesake, loads up all the buses and makes ham and cheese sandwiches so the kids can have a snack on the road. Ortiz keeps a notebook of all the problems Midland Legacy’s traveling band encounters so that they can be better prepared for the next trip. For the Week 3 game against Euless Trinity, Ortiz had the buses leave at 9:00 a.m. on Friday morning to account for construction. But traffic along the interstate crawled at 30 miles per hour past a car on fire and a flipped semi truck, and the team didn’t arrive at the stadium until 4 p.m.

But, usually, the opposing teams ease any potential hiccups by being such accommodating hosts. After last year’s game, Allen High School trainer Mike Harrison told Ortiz that they needed to stop at TwoRows Classic Grill for the pregame meal. Allen mayor Baine Brooks owned the joint, and he could give them a great deal. Sure enough, Midland Legacy was in and out in half an hour before this year’s game because Brooks had everything set up for them. When Midland Legacy visited Lake Travis, the school had a section of the parking lot blocked off for their buses. The Lake Travis booster club even allowed the Midland Legacy players to stretch in their pregame BBQ pit.

Of course, there are inherent disadvantages to all this travel. The players often miss an entire school day on Fridays and don’t get back into Midland until 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. Hartman says that 10-15 kids often ride back separately with their parents or stay in a hotel with their families.

“It used to be the old school, ‘You go with your team, you come home with your team,’” Hartman said. “Well, if there’s a single parent that needs someone to ride with them to make sure they stay awake, you need to think about that.” 

But once the team reaches its destination, they realize they’re better for the journey. Ortiz remembers the older varsity players coaching the younger ones through pregame nerves as they all peered up at Allen’s Eagle Stadium. On the ride, the teammates bond over card games like Spades and shared earbuds to watch a movie. Some of their best friends for life are made on the back of the bus.

The coaches believe these trips truly give the team an advantage come playoff time, not only because they play together, but because they’re used to the travel that other teams don’t experience until November.

“If you want to teach a kid how to be here on time, put a six-hour road trip in front of them and say, ‘You can’t be late because this bus will leave without you,’” Ortiz said.