Thursday, December 18, 1997

Sweetwater elevates assistant coach to head position

By BILL HART / Senior Staff Writer

SWEETWATER -- When Sweetwater hired Hank Dowell as an assistant football coach, he thought he would stay three years, then seek a head coaching position somewhere.

Twelve years later, Dowell got that head coaching job -- at Sweetwater.

The Sweetwater school board accepted Tom Ritchey's letter of retirement Monday night, then named Dowell, who has been the defensive coordinator, as the school's 25th head football coach.

"Not only did that show faith in me, but it was a compliment to our staff," said Dowell, who has been a head basketball coach previously, but this is his first head football position. "They wanted to keep our staff together."

Dowell will continue to head up the defense and Rex Whitfield will be the new offensive coordinator, a position Ritchey held although Whitfield had done a lot of the play calling the past two years, Dowell said.

Dowell went to high school at Byron-Driftwood, Okla., and graduated from Northwestern Oklahoma State. He coached one year in the junior high system at Plainview, then went to Idalou where he spent the next 13 years, 11 as head basketball coach.

Ritchey coached football at Idalou for 11 years and Dowell also began helping with the football team, first with the junior high and junior varsity, then eventually with the varsity.

In 1986, Ritchey took the job at Sweetwater and Dowell had a decision to make -- either stay in Idalou as head basketball coach or go to Sweetwater and coach football.

"I had to decide if I wanted to coach basketball or football, so I chose football," he said. "I wanted to be a head coach, but the jobs that came along were not what I wanted. I didn't want to go back to a small school and work my way back up. Besides, I liked Sweetwater and I wanted my kids to graduate from here.

"I appreciate the board moving as quickly as they did because we can go on working for next year. We will have a good team next year. We have three linemen, a tight end and two backs returning on offense, but we have only three back on defense, so our offense will be ahead for a few weeks.

"I plan to basically run the same offense and defense. We will make a few changes to fit our personnel. I worry about that 38-game regular-season winning streak. I want to keep it going and so do the kids, but we will have a tough schedule. It gets us ready because we know everyone will be out to beat us."

The Mustangs were 13-1 this past season and reached the Class 4A quarterfinals before losing to Denison, which is in the finals Saturday against La Marque.

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