ODESSA, Texas — Nearly two decades after he left Odessa Permian, the coach at the center of the “Friday Night Lights” book and film is back on the sidelines for the famous high school team.
Gary Gaines moved into college coaching just after leading the school to a state title in 1989, and then worked in athletics administration.
Now he has returned to help a storied prep football program still looking to rekindle its glory days. In March, the school board voted to rehire Gaines, who had been helping with the search for a coach.
The urge to return wasn’t just about coaching football in a state where fans’ fervor for Friday night games is quasi-religious.
“The thing that I missed more than the competitive side of it was just being around young people,” the 60-year-old Gaines said.
Gaines’ career journey has brought him full circle to the high school program he guided to a state 5A championship in 1989. It came just one season after H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger, a Philadelphia writer, spent a year in town researching his best-seller, which chronicled how high school football binds Odessa.
Made into a movie in 2004 and now an NBC television series that’s less about football than the community depicted, the book was a hit everywhere but Odessa. Locals felt Bissinger betrayed their hospitality by writing about the sociological woes surrounding the team and town, including allegations of racism and a win-at-all-costs mentality.
After leading the Panthers to that state title 20 years ago, Gaines left Permian to become linebackers coach at Texas Tech. He left coaching in 2005 after five years at Abilene Christian to return to Odessa as the school district’s athletic director. Two years later, he moved north to take a similar post in Lubbock.
Along the way, others who’d given up coaching for a desk job told Gaines the yen to be on the field would wane.
“But it never did with me,” Gaines said. “It was just a great opportunity to come back here. I really wasn’t looking necessarily to leave. It just worked out that way.”
Much has changed in high school football, however, since Gaines last coached.
He remembers his Permian teams running more than passing. Those Panthers teams averaged about 18 passes a game, “which I thought at that time we were airing it out,” Gaines chuckled. “Nowadays, if you don’t throw 35 (passes), you’re sitting on it.”
Don Billingsley, a tailback on the championship team, said Gaines’ character — his ethics and values — sets him apart.
“He wasn’t a screamer or a yeller,” he said. “There was no cursing. He expected respect and I think got as much out of his players as he could.”
Permian has won six state championships in 50 years, three of those coming in the 1980s when the Panthers lost only 11 games.
But the once-vaunted Panthers haven’t won a state title since 1991, and lost an unthinkable 49 games between 1997 and 2006.
That included a six-game skid to finish 2004, the longest losing streak in school history.
More recently, the Permian program has enjoyed something of a revival, making it to three region finals the past four seasons while compiling a 38-11 record under Darren Allman, a former Gaines protege who left this year to take another coaching job.
Gaines still maintains he has never read the book, though he acknowledged “probably” having softened to the hurt he initially felt to the point that he “thumbed through it at the bookstore one time.”
Bissinger said he holds Gaines and his coaching ability in high esteem.
“He knows how to win, how to motivate,” Bissinger said. “I think they could not have found a better replacement.”
