Ray Gates’s most prized possession is not North Crowley’s 2024 Class 6A DI State Championship trophy, nor the district titles his program has earned in each of his first three seasons as the head coach.

It’s a piece of wall art that hangs to the left of his desk. Six horizontal planks represent each stop of his coaching career. His wife, Sam, had it custom-made.

There’s no cookie-cutter for a sprawling journey like his. Gates, 42, has lived a nomadic coaching life. He spent a decade in the Panhandle and a few years in Central Texas. But his last two stops, as a defensive coordinator at Dallas-area Cedar Hill and head coach at North Crowley, are where Gates went from a rising star to a bona fide star. 

The Ray Gates that Texas high school football fans know now seems born to be the figurehead of a Dallas-Fort Worth area 6A dynasty. His baritone voice builds during a pregame speech until all his players - and the hairs on the back of their necks - stand at attention. No wonder North Crowley has won 31 consecutive regular season games. The tears that streamed down his cheeks after his Panthers beat Duncanville in the semifinals last year felt like they came from a man who’d waited for this moment, with this program, with this city, his entire life.

The truth is, he hadn’t. Gates has a big-city personality. But at his core, he’s a small-town country boy from Shiner, whose entire population of 2,163 people is smaller than North Crowley’s enrollment of 2,933. Four years ago, Gates wasn’t even familiar with the area he’s come to embody. His emotion and conviction come from knowing God called him to North Crowley. The wall art is a reminder of all the other places God brought him first, how each stop prepared him for this moment. His entire life has been a battle between his will and God’s. The wall art is a scoreboard showing that God prevailed. Gates is so thankful He did.

Becoming a football coach wasn’t Gates’s original plan. At Shiner High School, the teachers had all the seniors open a time capsule they’d written to their future selves in sixth grade. Gates wrote that he wanted to be a professional baseball player. Growing up, he spent every weekend at the baseball fields watching his dad and uncles’ softball team, the Shiner Bullets. The team was so dominant that they could only enter tournaments by giving a fake name. Gates’s earliest memories are looking at the five-tier trophy case in his house, then rummaging through the overflow of trophies in the garage.

A senior Gates chuckled when he opened that time capsule. It was the first instance of God’s plan differing from his own. By then, he was off to play college football after helping revive Shiner’s program. The Comanches had back-to-back losing seasons in 1996 and ‘97. Ray’s sophomore year, 1998, marked the start of a playoff streak that continues to this day. He rushed for 2,193 yards as a senior. 

When Shiner played Muenster in the Class 2A Division II State Championship in 2024, just a few days before North Crowley’s own game, Gates was on the sidelines in his Shiner purple. He still has a lot of pride - and a connection - to the Central Texas town. His father is starting his 39th season as an official in the area. Shiner head coach Daniel Boedeker was an assistant coach during Gates’s senior year.  

“What I remember about Ray is the consistency in his daily preparation,” Boedeker said. “Whether it was practice or games, there was always that mindset that he was going to be the best. Nobody was going to outwork him.” 

Boedeker wasn’t the only coach who recognized Gates’s calling. After wrapping up his collegiate career at Tarleton State, Gates signed with the Amarillo Dusters of the National Arena League. His head coach that first year, Don Carthel, left after four games to become the head coach at West Texas A&M. After a couple more seasons playing ball, Gates signed on with Carthel’s staff to start his coaching journey.

Gates spent three years as a graduate assistant at West Texas A&M, then moved to the high school ranks, first with Amarillo Tascosa and then with Dumas. After nearly 10 years, he decided to take a job at Round Rock Cedar Ridge to get closer to home. He would’ve been content to stay there for a decade. 

But his life changed during the 2016 Class 5A DI State Championship between Highland Park and Temple. Gates sat in the stands, explaining to his wife how his Cedar Ridge defense beat Temple the year prior. His booming voice carried a couple of seats in front of him, where a group of six head coaches began eavesdropping. After a quarter of action, then-Arlington Houston coach Anthony Criss turned around to put a face to the voice.  

“I hear you talking about ball,” Criss said. “You’re about to be on an interview right here.”

Criss peppered him with a couple of questions, then gestured to the rest of the crew he sat with. There was San Antonio East Central’s Joe Hubbard, Little Elm’s Kendrick Brown (now the Lancaster AD), long-time coach Mike Robinson, Lancaster’s Chris Gilbert (now the special assistant to the head coach at Texas). And then there was Carlos Lynn. 

“Now, you see all these guys down here?” Criss asked. “You’re sitting among Black royalty. When’s the last time you were around six Black head coaches?”

Never, Gates responded. 

Gates moved down next to the group for the rest of the day's games. He chopped it up with everyone, but he especially hit it off with Lynn, who was in the process of moving from Arlington Seguin to Cedar Hill. Others asked Gates about football schematics. Lynn asked Gates about his goals and aspirations.

A couple of weeks later, Lynn called him to interview for the defensive line coaching job.

“It’s all God, it had nothing to do with me,” Gates said. “(There are) 80,000 seats in AT&T Stadium, and I could’ve sat anywhere. If I don’t sit behind Coach Lynn, I never get to Cedar Hill.”

Much of North Crowley’s football program is molded after what Gates learned at Cedar Hill. He still marvels at the pulse Lynn had on his team’s emotions, coming up with a different slogan or theme every week of the season. Gates has never forgotten how focused Lynn was on serving his players and coaching staff, even though his son was undergoing a second stint of a rare form of cancer. Lynn’s example pushed the staff and players to go harder than they thought possible, propelling them to the state championship game in 2020.

That’s why, when he’s invited to speak at coaching associations, Gates talks about building a championship culture rather than Xs and Os. Coaching at Cedar Hill under Lynn was the first time he learned that you could beat any team, with any scheme, if you had culture. Gates kept the same cornerstone Bible Verse, Galatians 6:9, for his first head coaching job.

“Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap the harvest if we do not give up.” (NIV)

That verse applies far beyond the football field for Gates.

“Ray is a true friend,” Lynn said. “If something is going wrong or somebody is in trouble, he cannot sit idly by and watch it go down. He’ll extend a helping hand no matter what the appearance looks like.”

But that attitude does have a cost. When Gates took the North Crowley job, he took personal responsibility for every kid in the program. That responsibility had grown with the success. Now entering Year Four, he had to order 40 new football helmets. This fall, the school has the largest number of football players it has ever had.   

Sam recently posted on Facebook how football season meant their marriage was on pause. She knows her husband cannot take the head coaching hat off. She’s used to Ray getting a phone call he needs to tend to at the dinner table. Even if he doesn’t answer that one, another call comes, then a text, until finally he rises from the table with a half-empty plate. A couple of times a year, he rolls his barbecue smoker up to the football field and has his assistant coaches serve as line cooks for the football team. He was late for this interview because he’d spent half an hour after practice talking to a player about how to better handle adversity. 

But that dedication off the field is why North Crowley’s team is so dominant on it.

“Servant leadership is sacrificial,” Gates said. “You give so much of yourself to the ones you’re in charge of. I think on the back end, your cup is refilled because you’ve created a bond and relationship with these guys. They’re willing to give everything they have to you because of who you are to them.” 

And in the times his job feels the hardest, he has to remember how hard he prayed for it. That’s when he revisits the wall art. Because the schools that aren’t listed are just as important as the schools that are. 

In the last year-and-a-half as an assistant at Cedar Hill, Gates had Jeremiah 29:11 written in his wallet. The verse begins, “For I know the plans I have for you.” Next to that, Gates had written down the three plans he had for himself. The No. 1 goal was to become a head coach. In the 2022 offseason, he thought he’d accomplished it after crushing an interview with Dallas Skyline. He convinced himself that Ray Gates, Dallas Skyline head coach, was God’s plan. 

Then he didn’t get the job. The news rocked him. He called Lynn to throw himself a pity party. For the first time in his life, Gates felt like the game was turning its back on him.  

“Well, if that’s how you feel, then the Devil has you right where he wants you,” Lynn said.

Gates had spent five seasons in a program whose cornerstone verse was Galatians 6:9. For the first time, he realized it wasn’t just for the players. 

“That was the biggest gut punch to me,” Gates said. “He was also saying that everything we do in this program to teach our kids how to handle adversity, we’re not immune to using those same tools. This is your time to stand up in a time of adversity in your life.”

Dallas Skyline had been his plan. He’d had the bible verse about God’s plan and the three goals of his plan written down next to each other for so long that he’d confused them as the same thing.  

One week after the Skyline door closed, North Crowley’s head coaching job opened.

Gates didn’t know much about the school, but he recognized this was the reason Skyline had passed him over. He had a college friend whose sister coached at North Crowley, so he contacted her to ask if she could arrange an interview for him. He reached out to another mentor, Allen Wilson, who’d coached Crowley ISD superintendent, Dr. Michael McFarland. Then, he called Chris Gilbert, whom he’d first met at the 2016 state championship games, because he’d worked for McFarland at Lancaster.

Ninety minutes later, Gates’s phone rang.

“I don’t know who you have on your team,” McFarland said. “But your name has come across my desk in the last hour from three different people. So I had to pick up the phone and call you.”

Gates was hired in February 2022. 

North Crowley had won a Class 4A State Championship in 2003, but suffered a losing season every year from 2006-19 in the state’s largest classification. But the coach before Gates, Courtney Allen, had posted 6–4 and 7–4 campaigns in his final two years. 

Gates insists he didn’t change anything from what Allen was building. North Crowley had always had athletes. But those athletes had often moved away in search of another option. Allen had started convincing them to stay home. Gates inherited a talented sophomore class headlined by quarterback Chris Jimerson. 

Gates took those young players in their formative varsity years and injected energy into every aspect of the program. Music blared at practice, oftentimes with Gates on the mic. When they made a big play, they would party on the numbers. North Crowley shocked Lovejoy, the No.2-ranked team in the state, en route to a 12–1 season.

One evening during that first season, Gates was driving a senior player home when that player turned to him in the passenger seat. 

“Coach, thank you,” he said.

“For what?” Gates asked.

“Y’all made football fun,” he said.

That senior, and the historic Class of 2025, may have graduated. But Gates still sees them every time North Crowley plays on a Friday night.

“When we get on the field, yes, you guys are looking at the 2025-26 North Crowley football team,” Gates said. “I’m looking at the North Crowley football program. Did our program do what it needed to do to get us over the hump for whoever we’re playing?”

Before you leave, Gates has to take you somewhere. He hops in a motorized cart and zooms across the North Crowley campus toward an active construction zone. Then walks inside a cavernous, concrete skeleton of a building. At least, that’s what this looks like to a first-timer. But Gates has pored over the blueprints of the indoor track and field complex over and over until he can only see the future. 

The second floor will be a wall-to-wall weight room. This stack of steel beams is where the locker room will be. This corner is the head coach’s office, and Gates describes it like he’s already moved in.

When this is completed in 2026, North Crowley will have a facility that’s nicer than many Division I colleges. It’ll pair perfectly with the football machine that Gates has built since he arrived in 2022. And just as he can point out sections of this building you can’t see yet, he planned to accomplish at North Crowley what nobody thought possible. 

“I think you have to be a little bit unrealistic with your vision and goals,” said Eli Reinhart, Gates’s offensive coordinator for three years. “That pushed us to higher limits, because I don’t know if, three years ago, people were thinking about North Crowley winning a state championship. That was his vision from Day One.”

Gates knows now that the climb to the top is a series of ups and downs. He represents the North Crowley program. But his persona is like the cover of a jigsaw puzzle that most don’t know have all the pieces to.

Gates’s regular season winning streak will be put to the test against DeSoto this Friday night. No matter the outcome, he and this program will be ok. He started a journal this year titled, “Conversations with Failure,” because he knows now that those pieces of failure in his life were supposed to be in the puzzle box, necessary chapters of his story that made him who he is today.  

“From the time that I got an interview, to the time that I’m sitting here talking to you, everything has lined up according to God’s will,” Gates said. “Every issue, every problem that could go on here, I feel like God has equipped me along the way with the tools necessary to handle whatever might arise at North Crowley. This is the place I’m supposed to be.”