Back in 2013, a tall slow walking Texan was hired to revamp a football program that was coming off of consecutive 2-8 seasons. No one knew much about Zack Hudson at the time, except for the superintendent and school board who met with him and were highly impressed. It has been said before that Hudson separated himself from the pack and had made himself the clear and obvious choice for hire.
Hudson, who recently accepted the head coaching position at Class 4A Mabank, came to a different Howe than it is today and he is responsible for many of the upgrades. In 2013, the downtown Howe area was like a deserted movie set, the old First Christian Church was still dilapidated, Summit Hill had streets but no homes as if someone changed their mind about Howe. While the look of the town nearly scared his wife, the athletic facilities somewhat matched the city. Hudson immediately went to work. The young and hungry coach and athletic director quickly showed his meticulous character that is near obsessive to attention to detail. He was exactly the right guy at the right time.
The class of 2013 male athlete was typical in appearance from many small schools around here, but Hudson immediately implemented a weightlifting program and running program which gradually changed the look of the typical Howe athlete. The summer before his first football season in the fall of 2013, Hudson had instituted a non-mandatory, peer pressured mandatory workout session. Kids got off the couches and started making strides to better themselves and the Bulldogs athletic program.
A problem was the ability to have the kids buy into a program when the field house facilities looked as they did at Bulldog Stadium in 2013. A five-year plan had been in place to upgrade all facilities including the baseball field and the addition of a softball field on the athletic campus grounds. Hudson, who will say that he is not, IS a salesman and was able to speed up the five-year plan to one. In February of 2014, the 1960s portion of the old field house was obliterated which left only the 1989 weight room standing. A matching metal building was placed at an equal distance to the south, for aesthetic purposes to satisfy Hudson’s acute attention to detail. A brand new scoreboard went up on the south end of the field and was moved to the east side of the field from the west so Hudson could easily see it better. The pressbox which was built in 1981 and a level added to it in 1991 came down and was replaced with an upgraded facility. The Howe Bulldog Victory Light was removed, but that would reappear in the downtown area at the end of the 2014 football season as the city had also begun to upgrade the look and feel of the town. A new ticket office was placed at the entrance of the stadium with a wrought iron fence surrounding the area. A little over a year after Hudson’s arrival, the Bulldog athletes romped the oldest active stadium in North Texas with pride. Eventually, the new softball field was completed and the baseball field was upgraded. Press boxes and a concessions area were placed at each field. Without Hudson, the facilities would not have transformed from a Sanford and Son appearance to the feel of ‘moving on up like George and Weezie.’ He also took the booster club to another level which helped to financially back his vision. It took the right guy at the right time.
Not only was Hudson transforming hallowed grounds, he was formulating a plan to transform the football program. One afternoon late in 2013 as he was working on stadium turf once covered in Dallisgrass, Hudson whispered that he had figured it out. He was going to search for a guy who could implement the slot-T offense. Hudson explained that Howe will rarely have large linemen and a dead-ringer quarterback (which historically has come around once every 30 years in this town). He explained that Howe will always have an abundance of quick guards and hungry kids. Hudson immediately talked of East Bernard who had recently won the state championship due to the slot-T scheme. He then ripped off a half a dozen other schools including Waskom that were using this offense to do things that young defensive coaches had never defended. That afternoon Hudson walked away with a look on his face that he had just discovered the secret code to Fort Knox. It wasn’t long before he had found his man in Dale West to implement that slot-T offense and we all know what happened 13,269 rushing yards later. Hudson was right.
The tall athletic director’s knack for hiring great coaches is right up there with his abilities to improve a football program. Along with West, he was able to land a former athletic director in Wes Rhoten and a dual football and basketball coach in Tim Short. After his staff was picked over and hired in other places, he once again stockpiled his staff with former athletic directors with a lot of experience including the popular Mike Segleski and the passionate highly qualified head basketball coach Eric Johns.
Hudson’s meticulousness led to him becoming Howe’s all-time leader in playoff wins among the 25 coaches in Howe history dating back to 1935. Nicknamed the “Riverboat Gambler”, by way of taking fourth-down chances, he also will leave Howe with 30 overall wins which rank him fourth out of 25 only behind Norman Dickey, Jim Fryar, and Davey DuBose.
The play on the field is usually a direct reflection of the head coach and none exemplified that more than Tanner Hartsfield and Andrew Griffin, coincidentally the two players that spent the most time with Hudson. The two played hard-nosed, full speed, bruising play from the linebacker position which was exactly what Hudson craved. It earned the players a truckload of gold footballs to boot. It also earned them a vastly different appearance than the Class of 2013. With four years in the program, the kids that are walking out of athletics now look like Class 3A big school athletes. Bigger, stronger, and faster kids help head coaches elevate their careers and Hudson has just done that.
There is no question that Howe ISD made the right choice in 2013 and now they find themselves strapped with the need to do so again. Howe’s Superintendent Kevin Wilson is a former coach who certainly knows a good one when he sees one. He hired the right guy at the right time.
