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The Rebooting Of Rogers' Football Program

Posted: Jul 15th 2012 By: CMBurnham

Oklafan Editor's Note: Gary Tuell is better known to professional wrestling fans in Oklahoma as Gary Tool

It's late May, the last day of spring football practice at new Rogers High School. An angry wind rages from the east, surging down that dreaded hill and across the field, knocking down passes and pushing over tackling dummies.

To the left, a section of the $739,000 artificial turf is blackened by a vandal's fire. To the right, a square has been cut from the track. There are empty bottles and crushed cigarettes in the grass, bleachers no bigger than a porch swing and all of 17 players on the field - the most gifted of whom could be an eighth-grade equipment manager.

And yet, hope rises. Promise awaits.

Welcome to new Rogers - officially, Will Rogers College High School - where the football team has had one winning season in the last 36 years, and things were so much worse than that.

"I heard there was a bad team," said 15-year-old sophomore A.J. Lewis, "and it was kind of a bad school."

For nearly 40 years, Rogers decayed into the worst an inner city school has to offer: bad behavior, bad grades, and of course, bad football.

But last year, as part of Tulsa Public Schools' Project Schoolhouse, Rogers was shut down, rebooted. Current students were rerouted to other secondary schools (rising freshmen could opt-in), faculty and administrators were reassigned within the district (or could reapply at Rogers), and the 2011 football team consisted of freshmen only.

New Rogers will add a small class of juniors this year. Next year they'll be the new school's first class of seniors.

Now, Rogers is an application-only magnet school.

"You can't just live across the street and come here," said football coach Gary Tuell. "You have to apply, you have to qualify, you have to keep certain standards to come here."

The government calls it a turnaround model. Ex-Ropers call it gratifying.

"We're excited about Rogers again," said Art Fleak, perhaps the proudest ex-Roper and president of the new Rogers Football Booster Club.

"When they fully understand it, they get excited," Tuell said. "They say, 'Wow, this is something we can be proud of again; not gangs, not drugs, not sex in the hallways, not teachers getting beat up by kids.'

"That's what Rogers was before."

Essentially, Rogers' underachieving troublemakers have been replaced by students who are ambitious and mostly well-behaved. They (and their families who helped them apply) come from all over the district, seeking out academic success and they are eager to learn.

"If you have a good, solid academic base," Tuell said, "then athletics will follow."

New TPS athletic director Gil Cloud, another proud Rogers alum, said when he was AD at Union, the Redskins' best teams were also their most successful in the classroom. Similarly, Cloud said, great things are coming for Rogers athletics.

"They want to make it academically charged," Cloud said, "which gives you a better quality of student-athlete."

At Rogers, that's a dramatic and long overdue change. Fleak, who went on to play at Oklahoma State before getting his law degree just across Harvard Avenue at the University of Tulsa, looks out his downtown office window with great sorrow over what Rogers became after he left, and with equally great joy at what the school is now.

"I'd go to Rogers and I'd say, 'Hey, that looks like the same people I see over at the jail.' I just kind of washed my hands of it," Fleak said. "Quite frankly, I was afraid they would burn it down, or run their cars into it or whatever."

The key is the allure of college credit for upperclassmen. Juniors and seniors can pursue their high school diplomas at the same time they're getting a two-year associate's degree through Tulsa Community College.

"It's a good opportunity," said sophomore Travis Hytche, 15. "You get two years of college education, so if you do go to a four-year college, you can do two more years and then another four years and have your master's in six years."

Sounds smart. Of course, it'd be good for the football team if Tuell actually had some juniors and seniors.

"My anticipation is we'll end up with 30 guys on the varsity team next year," Tuell said. "With that, about half will be freshmen and half will be sophomores."

Last fall, Rogers reopened its doors from the reboot with a football team built entirely out of freshmen. The Ropers didn't compete on the varsity level, but played an all-freshman schedule. That means an entire season of ticket revenue and concessions was lost.

Not that anybody came to games anyway. The Ropers haven't been good since Dave Rader was the quarterback. Attendance dwindled to nearly nothing as the team made just two playoff appearances in the last 3 1/2 decades.

But the reboot is expected to fix that. Not right away, of course. In the 2011-12 academic year, other than the freshman football team, Rogers competed in Class A in all sports. This year, everyone's back in 4A.

"That's gonna be tough. Real tough," Cloud said. "So the immediate gratification's not gonna be there. But we've got to stay the course. ... In order to build this thing, the football program and the athletic program, we've got to be patient."

Tuell said the players - all 17 who were at the final spring practice, and maybe a few others he expects to report this fall - won't offer any excuses. They're eager to see how they stack up against older kids, and they embrace the idea of being in on the ground floor of something special.

"Athletically, as far as speed, I'm not worried about it," Tuell said. "We've got kids that can move. ... Are we gonna face kids that are faster? Sure. But are they gonna be faster in two years? No.

"Now, the pounding, the physical part - that, I'm worried about."

Tuell said he expects at least two freshmen to start on the offensive line, and "that will be hard." But he also sees a bright future. As eighth-graders last season, this year's freshman class made the semifinals of the city postseason tournament. And the class under them, freshmen in 2013, did even better.

"They won everything you can win in TPS's league," Tuell said. "They won the preseason All-City Tournament, they tied for first during the season league, they won the postseason tournament, they won everything. They only lost one game."

And Tuell, a former high school principal who has a master's degree and teaches biological sciences, isn't looking over his shoulder. He knows it's a long-term rebuild.

"Gary cares about those kids," Cloud said. "In the long run, he'll get it done."

Sophomore Devon Robinson, 15, transferred from East Central. Lewis came over from Hale. Hytche was going to go to Memorial or maybe Booker T. Washington. Now they're teammates with a vision for the future.

And they're not the only ones. Fleak wants to convert the natural bowl-shaped topography between the school and the practice field into a stadium. Cloud estimates it could be done for $1 million to $1.5 million, though he admits he's not in a hurry to add a sixth TPS stadium.

"If you get the right person involved," Cloud said, "I think you can do those things."

Cloud said he recently walked the grounds with Rogers principal Stacey Vernon and became nostalgic thinking of all the fitness sprints he and his teammates used to run up that brutal hill. Now he sees the burn marks and vandalism and litter and wonders, "How in the world did it get to this point?"

"It's gonna be a while," Cloud said, "before that program wins."

And that's OK. In all likelihood, the Ropers will be winless again in 2012. It will take time, but a rock-solid foundation is being laid. The players on this year's team and perhaps next year's are getting experiences during the Rogers reboot that players at other schools won't get.

"You have to wait on seniors at other schools," Robinson said, "but here we get to be leaders and stuff like that."

Said Tuell, "We don't have those seniors here, so we're trying to build leadership out of a group of kids that aren't expected to be leaders.

"I think in the long run, it's gonna pay off even more for us. I think when these guys are seniors, they're gonna be fantastic leaders for us."