No team is better than .500.
And as a whole, they are 0-11 against the district they’ll face in the first round of the Class 5A football playoffs.
That is the situation of the teams of District 13-5A with league play set to begin Thursday with Belton’s game at Harker Heights. On Friday night, Temple will host Bryan and College Station A&M Consolidated will look to shake its winless start at Killeen Shoemaker. Killeen Ellison has the bye in the seven-team district.
Temple coach Bryce Monsen said that with the district as open as it seems, that creates a positive attitude among the players - the type of mindset needed to make the playoffs.
“They feel like they have hope and know if they play hard and prepare hard that they have a chance,” Monsen said. “All teams in our district have to be like, ‘Hey, we just started our second season. We’re all about the same, and the team that prepares the best is going to be the team that has the best chance for success.’”
The start of district play might come as a respite for 13-5A’s teams, who have an overall record of 8-19. Perhaps the scariest fact of all is 13-5A’s continued struggle against 14-5A - Round Rock’s four schools plus Pflugerville, Georgetown, Cedar Park and Leander.
After 14-5A went 10-5 last year in meetings between the districts - including 4-0 in the bi-district round of the playoffs - 13-5A has posted an 0-11 mark this year. Ellison, considered a top-tier team in 13-5A, lost 59-25 last Friday to Round Rock Stony Point, projected as one of 14-5A’s bottom teams.
Even District 16-4A is 5-for-5 against 13-5A. A&M Consolidated, generally considered one of the state’s strongest programs, hasn’t won a game this year. That has caused longtime coach Jim Slaughter to look differently on the district the coaches picked his Tigers to win.
“We’ve got a real, real young and inexperienced group and we’ve played some good people,” Slaughter said. “I’m just afraid of it getting like a snowball on. Once a snowball gets going down a hill, it just keeps growing and growing and gets near impossible to stop. We’ve got to start getting better here soon.”
Belton enters 13-5A play tied with Ellison and Bryan for the best record at 2-2. The Vikings needed an upset of No. 8 DeSoto to reach the .500 mark. All six losses for those three teams came at the hands of 14-5A foes.
Belton coach Rodney Southern cites two reasons for the dominance of 14-5A. The first is the number of “new” programs in 13-5A - four of the seven teams have coaches who have been at the helm four years or fewer.
“When you look at programs in transition like us and Harker Heights, you also look at a community in Killeen that’s in transition,” Southern said. “I know when you have a program in transition and you have a program where a coach or staff has been there three or four years, it would give you an advantage obviously.”
The second reason, Southern said, is a little more plain: 14-5A has outscored 13-5A 372-170 in its 11 wins, a 34-15 average.
“The other thing you have to say about the situation right now is that they just beat us,” he said. “I can’t speak for the other teams, but Georgetown had a plan against us and just beat us. (Round Rock McNeil) had a great plan against us. I think we had a good plan, (but) I think it came down to mistakes and they beat us.”
Southern and Todd McVey of Harker Heights are 13-5A’s two first-year coaches. Slaughter and McVey coach the district’s winless teams. The district’s two other wins were provided by Temple against South Garland and Shoemaker against El Paso Socorro in season openers.
Monsen doesn’t take much stock - “none” to be exact - in the pre-district slate.
“The preseason (non-district) depends on so many things - the types of teams you play and their competition level,” he said. “A lot of times a coach will hold a kid out to get him healthy for the start of district. It doesn’t mean anything.”
For Monsen, it also proves what he said at the start of the season and stands by now - that “anybody has got a chance to beat anybody on any given night.” For coaches such as Slaughter who originally thought there was more disparity in the district, they’ve started to come around to Monsen’s theory.
“The district is probably a lot more equal than it has been the past few years,” Slaughter said. “Right now, Killeen Ellison and Bryan are the standouts, but we haven’t seen Belton play yet. We’ve seen the other two on film. It’s still real hard to judge right now.
“The rest of us are probably more equal than we’d like it to be."
ecarifio@temple-telegram.com
