Yates looks to settle the score with history

"We knew what they said about Yates, that they could get to the big game but couldn't win it," Smith said. "But this was our time and our place, and our goal was to get to the big game, win it and leave no doubt we were the better team."

They did. On Dec. 21, 1985, the Lions crushed Odessa Permian 37-0, winning the most lopsided UIL title game among big schools in almost 30 years and becoming the first UIL 5A champion from a historically black school. They were the first 5A team to finish 16-0, and although the scoring records they set in 1985 have been surpassed, they remain arguably the best Texas high school football team of the last three decades.

Ronald Mumphery, the team's line coach, estimates that 30 of 36 seniors on the team received college scholarships.

At least 19 played four years of college football, and 21 earned degrees. At least five signed with NFL teams.

A half-dozen, including Price and Bailey, after stints in the NFL, became high school teachers or coaches.

The same number work in public safety, including Foster, who is a juvenile corrections officer in Iowa, and Alexander, who is a firefighter in Houston.

Today in their footsteps walk young men named Orie Lemon, Eli Lemon, Patrick Dorsey, Stacy Williams and Joe Scott, who, after a summer vacation that commenced last week, will compete for the Yates football team this fall.

The dream is the same — as they take their stance on the practice field, today's Lions say "school," and as they take their first strides downfield, they chant "state." But the hallways of Yates High School are considerably different than in 1985.

A steady decline

Rated by the Texas Education Agency as "academically unacceptable" for the past three years, Yates briefly faced the prospect this spring of being handed over to an outside agency before school trustees voted to leave it in the hands of its new principal, Yates alumnus George August.

Enrollment is less than half what it was in 1985.

Every morning, hundreds of students zoned to attend Yates leave their neighborhood en route to higher-rated HISD campuses.

So as students depart for the summer, the question is this: When the Jack Yates Class of 2006 returns for its senior year, does it have any reasonable hope to match the accomplishments of its predecessors on the football field or in the classroom?

Admittedly, it's a tall order. The 1985 Lions, after all, were so talented that junior Santana Dotson, who later became an all-conference lineman for the Baylor Bears and won a Super Bowl ring with the Green Bay Packers, spent most of the season on the bench.

"There were some grown men on that team," Dotson said.

A power in the segregated Prairie View Interscholastic League from the 1940s through the '60s and a consistent contender in UIL events, Yates has remained competitive but has played just once for the title since 1985, losing to Temple in the 1992 5A Division II final.

After dropping to Class 4A in 2004, the Lions finished 10-3 and advanced to the third round of the Division II playoffs.

But academics, not athletics, has been the recent focus.

The school was designated as "unacceptable" in 2002 because of poor dropout-data record-keeping, and certain demographics within the school performed poorly on standardized math tests last year, triggering potential TEA sanctions.

There are other changes. From 2,700 in 1985, Yates' enrollment had dropped to about 1,900 by 1991, and the school had a net loss of about 60 students to magnet programs and other transfers.

This year, of 1,767 students living in the Yates attendance zone, only 926 — 52.4 percent — attended the school. With an enrollment of 1,302, including 349 transfer magnet students, Yates had a net loss of almost 600 students to other HISD campuses.

Tracing the problems

James Douglas , former president of Texas Southern University and a vocal HISD critic, questions whether Yates' incoming seniors can match the record of their predecessors.

"The answer is without a doubt no," Douglas said. "The HISD has done a good job of destroying neighborhood schools. They've taken the best out of Yates. They've taken the best students, the best athletes, the best everything, and then they wonder why they don't perform the way they ought to."

Lawrence Marshall, a retired HISD administrator and current school board member, said Yates' problems stem from leadership issues in the late 1980s.

In 1989, HISD Superintendent Joan Raymond appointed him to head a task force to address emerging academic deficiencies.

"We decided to use athletics as a port of entry to build on the successful things that had happened in the school," Marshall said. "While we had great stability on the athletic side, we had great instability over on the leadership side. We were able to stabilize the school because we counted heavily on the coaching staff."

Marshall said his task force crafted a rebuilding plan that called for new leadership in the mold of Luther Booker, who in 15 years as Yates' football coach won 13 district titles and the 1985 state championship.

"He had the attributes that reflected the things you want in a school leader," Marshall said. "And so we included that in a blueprint that called for a revolution in what was going on at Yates academically, and it was ignored. It was completely ignored by the superintendent of schools.

"We're still trying to correct mistakes made under that leadership. At the time I left the district in 1991, my forecast is that it would take 20 years to repair the damage."

Maurice McGowan, who has been around Yates for more than 25 years as an assistant football coach, head coach and, since retirement, substitute teacher, said the reality and the image of Yates have changed drastically.

"These kids (from the 1980s) wanted to do things," McGowan said. "Kids today don't have the same goals or ambitions. In the '80s, you'd talk, and they would listen. Today, you have to do a lot of talking and hope that they listen. But they're still good kids.

"Yates also got a bad reputation that people couldn't learn there. When you're a parent and you want your kids to have the best, that makes it hard."

Dotson, who was the third generation of his family to attend Yates, said: "I can't honestly say now that it's a school that I would want to send my kids to or a school that I should willingly send my kids to.

"For Yates to turn around, it has to come from within. When I was there, we had teachers who had been there for 20 years. They were like the paint on the walls, and they cared. If you have committed staff members and teachers and if you're committed in the classroom, it seems that things work out."

Laying the groundwork

On a Monday afternoon earlier this month, Clarence McKinney , a 1988 Yates graduate who was named this spring as the Lions' new head football coach, glances around the practice field. His mind, for the moment, is clearly lost in the '80s.

"I had a lot of battles here, a lot of battles," he said. "We didn't have this much grass on it when I played. It was all dirt in the middle."

Then McKinney snaps back to the present, blows his whistle and runs 92 freshmen, sophomores and juniors through the day's opening round of offseason drills.

Players arrive at 4:15 p.m. for stretching and weightlifting, but first they must line up at the locker-room door and hand in the day's grade-check sheets, a requirement McKinney brought with him from his previous job at Galena Park North Shore. Teachers are asked to indicate whether students completed the day's assignments and arrived on time or if they misbehaved in class.

McKinney takes these forms seriously. As he flips through the pile, players in shorts and T-shirts line up on the floor in front of him.

But it has been an unusual day — including assemblies to choose the year's Mr. and Miss Jack Yates — and the lines aren't straight, and the chatter is a bit too loud.

So it's out the door for 10 minutes of grass drills — running in place, dropping into a pushup position as McKinney blows his whistle, then back to their feet.

Only then do players return to the locker room so McKinney can riffle through the forms.

Violators are assigned to the pit crew — 20 minutes running three flights of stairs in a stairwell without air conditioning alongside the practice field.

"Anything the teacher writes — one minute late to class, didn't do their assignment — I give them the pit," McKinney said. "I'm trying to teach them a little responsibility."

McKinney replaced Ray Evans, who resigned this spring after winning area coach-of-the-year honors. It's the first coaching job for McKinney, who worked as an assistant at Houston Washington and at North Shore.

"This has been my dream ever since I was a high school student, to come back and coach at Yates," he said. "I went into education to give back. Where better to give back than to a child who was just like me 15, 20 years ago?"

Even as he increases expectations on the field and in the classroom, McKinney is rapidly winning the trust of players such as Orie Lemon, a three-year starter who has won all-district mention at quarterback and defensive end, and his younger brother Eli, who rushed for 819 yards last season.

"He's a real disciplined coach and a good person to have here at Jack Yates," Orie Lemon said. "We're working harder than we worked last year. He's making us work."

August is impressed with the "rigor and discipline" he sees from Yates players during spring practice. Ronald Miller, a teacher and assistant coach at Yates for 24 years, has helped with the transition. And Yates has no bigger booster than Mumphery, who is principal of Cullen Middle School, one of Yates' primary feeder schools.

"Parents need to go to Yates and to see that there is now an atmosphere where learning can take place," Mumphery said. "My kids are going to Yates. I put them on a bus and buy them shirts that say 'Yates Bound' and send them over for a day."

Fighting perceptions

Lemon, like many Yates students, parents and alumni, resents the implication that Yates offers a substandard education because it has fallen short of certain TEA criteria.

"People can't know about Yates unless they come and sit in the classroom with us," he said. "Then they would see that we have some real focused students. People undergrade us."

Patrick Dorsey, a junior defensive lineman who had 61 tackles last season, added: "We're not low-performing. We did better on our test scores than people believe we did. We're better than that. And we're trying to get that stain off our name."

The Lions are favored to win their district this year but won't be ranked among the top teams in the state.

"All eyes are on us to see what we do next," McKinney said. "What's the next move? Are they going to shut Yates down? Is Yates on the rise?

"I want the challenge. I encourage it in our kids. We'll strive to meet it. I don't think winning is a goal that we can't accomplish."

And winning, in turn, could mean a lot to Yates' psyche. Marshall thinks it could be part of a "renaissance" at the school.

Then, perhaps, the hallways of Yates will be as electric this fall as they were in the midst of the 1985 championship run.

"When students see athletes exhibiting skill and precision on and off the field, going to class and completing assignments, I think that will affect our students," August said.

"Our coach has sounded the clarion tone. I think people will be talking about this team and that it will have an impact on morale on this campus and engender the kind of spirit I can recall as a student."

Classes ended Thursday. The season starts Sept. 3. The challenge is at hand.

david.barron@chron.com