Ray Gates wasn’t expecting much out of his first interview for a high school football head-coaching job five years ago. The former Tarleton State defensive lineman, then in his mid-thirties, simply wanted to experience the process. The folks at North Dallas High, coming off a 2–7 finish in 2018, thanked the Cedar Hill assistant for coming in and turned elsewhere for their next coach.
Not long after that, Gates was granted a virtual interview at Dallas’s Carter High, but the school didn’t ask him back for an in-person follow-up. At Richardson’s Berkner High in 2021, Gates participated in multiple interview rounds with the Metroplex school, but he again lost out on the job to another coach.
In the spring of 2022, Gates was confident he’d landed the head job at Dallas’s Skyline High, but then, he said, “the entire situation was very weird,” and he wasn’t hired.
Gates, who turns 42 in November, looks back on those close calls and insists he never let them discourage him. “I’m a firm believer in seasons and time,” he said. “Something has to set you apart. I knew my time would come. You just need to hear one ‘yes.’ ”
Only weeks after the near-miss at Skyline, Gates heard his “yes” from Michael McFarland, the superintendent at Crowley Independent School District, who sought to fill the vacancy at North Crowley High after Courtney Allen left for another coaching gig in Mesquite.
Now nearing the conclusion of his third season coaching the Panthers, Gates has heard nothing but congratulations following every regular-season game—twenty-eight straight wins with no losses—and, he’s on the brink of bringing a third consecutive district title to a school that had never won one outright before the coach’s arrival.
North Crowley competes in Class 6A, a level of Texas football reserved for the largest high schools by student population. The Panthers reached the state semifinals of last year’s 6A Division I playoffs, losing to two-time champion Duncanville. This year’s team has rampaged through the first eight games of its schedule, beating opponents by an average of 40.7 points (a margin that has grown to 59.5 points in the Panthers’ district matches).
Gates told Texas Monthly that his 2024 roster contains twenty-five players who have received offers to play college football. That includes senior quarterback Chris Jimerson Jr., senior receiver Quentin Gibson, senior running back Daniel Bray, and junior offensive tackle John Turntine III (one of the nation’s top recruits in the class of 2026).
“We’re really, really good on offense,” Gates said. That’s an understatement. The Panthers have gone into punt formation three times this season. On defense, North Crowley football has allowed an average of 16.2 points per game, and that dips to 13 points per game in district play.
Gates ordinarily describes a successful season by whether his team is still alive halfway through the six-round playoff format organized by the University Interscholastic League, which oversees high school sports competition in Texas. He tells his players: “After Thanksgiving, there are no turkeys left.”
After last season’s semifinal run, even more is expected of the Panthers in 2024. “We’ve upped the ante; we feel like we’re a championship-caliber team,” Gates said. “We know that road goes through Duncanville and potentially North Shore [the 6A Division I finalists for the past three years]. Everybody’s going to say it’s going to be those two teams playing each other again. But we feel like this is our year to put our name in that basket.”
McFarland said he chose to hire Gates for the North Crowley position over two other finalists who had head-coaching experience. “He didn’t have any skins on the wall, but he had the potential in the heart,” McFarland said. “He had that passion and desire to really use football as a tool to impact a young man’s life.”
North Crowley football players soon experienced Gates’s intensity. The coach sharply laid out his expectations for the team on day one. “I remember the first time he yelled at me. I didn’t even know what I was doing—‘Ya gotta tighten down!’ ” Xavier Coleman, a senior defensive end headed to Yale, recalled about his coach’s sharp demand that players pay attention to detail. “I tightened down so fast. He just brings the type of energy to practice. Everybody feeds off it.”
“Everything that we do is built on what we call having juice,” Gates said. “Having energy. Having passion. When we took that approach and injected that into our program, our kids saw something different, and I think we captured our kids because of that.”
Gates was somewhat taken aback following a 17–14 win over Arlington High School two games into his North Crowley career. “Everyone was going crazy,” he said. He learned after the game that the Panthers hadn’t beaten the Colts in the teams’ previous eleven meetings. “We’ve done a lot of firsts,” he said. “Had never gone ten and zero before. Won our first outright district championship.” (North Crowley’s 2003 team did win the Class 4A Division I state title after beginning that season 0–3.)
Given the timing of Gates’s hiring, he inherited the team’s nondistrict schedules for the 2022 and 2023 seasons. When scheduling began last winter for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, he wasted no time booking four nondistrict opponents that he described as a “gauntlet.”
“We felt like we needed to be pushed,” Gates said. “Losing to Duncanville in round five [a 52–10 blowout last December], that was the biggest game that a lot of our kids had ever played in. They had no measuring stick for what that would be like.”
So Gates lined up nondistrict games to expose his team to a level of competition close to what they’d find in the state semifinals and finals. This season began with matchups against Lancaster, a Class 5A stalwart that was promoted this year to 6A; DeSoto, the two-time 6A Division II state champion; and Denton Guyer and Rockwall, two teams that play challenging offensive styles.
The Panthers beat Lancaster 29–21 and then headed to DeSoto, who came into the September showdown with their own 23-game winning streak that included handing Duncanville its only loss of the previous two seasons. North Crowley senior offensive lineman Ian Carter said his classmates “were talking about how much we were going to lose by.”
While preparing his squad to play DeSoto, Gates invoked an unforgettable moment in sports history that many of his teenage players probably weren’t aware of. “Buster Douglas,” Gates said, referring to the heavyweight boxer who stunned then-unbeaten Mike Tyson in 1990. “We talked about having one opportunity to go in and play a team that had a twenty-three–game winning streak at their place and throw that knockout punch.”
The result was more of a TKO—a thrilling 57–51 win “that nobody thought would even be close,” Gates said. Gibson had seven receptions for 180 yards and four touchdowns.
The football gods were with the Panthers that night. The game featured two of the three times this season that North Crowley has gone into punt formation. The first time, Malachi Releford’s punt was blocked, but he grabbed the bouncing ball and ran for a first down. The second time was a fake, also resulting in a first down.
The Panthers then beat Guyer 49–28 and Rockwall 70–17. The closest of the team’s four subsequent district games has been a 56-point win. North Crowley could be tested in its two remaining regular-season games. The Mansfield Tigers will bring a 7–1 record to North Crowley tomorrow night. Then there will be a rivalry game on the same field next Thursday night against the Crowley High Eagles, who are 6–3 and off this weekend. Years ago, Crowley head coach Carlos Lynn hired Gates as an assistant coach for his staff at Cedar Hill High.
Despite both schools having “Crowley” in their names, the season finale won’t be an intracity game. North Crowley High is located in far southern Fort Worth. Its attendance zone extends well into Cowtown.
Gates had little connection to Fort Worth football before he arrived at North Crowley. He attended high school in Shiner, almost ninety miles east of San Antonio. After Tarleton, he played arena football in Amarillo and followed his coach, Don Carthel, to West Texas A&M to begin his own coaching career. Gates decided to move on to high school coaching and worked as an assistant at Amarillo’s Tascosa High and then at Dumas High, another school in the Panhandle. Wanting to get closer to his Central Texas roots, he made his next stop at Round Rock’s Cedar Ridge. He joined Lynn’s Cedar Hill staff in 2017.
Gates has embraced his Panthers carrying the torch for Fort Worth football, which hasn’t produced a UIL state champion since Arlington Heights High in 1948. The North Crowley players wear the city’s primary area code, 817, on their helmets, and Gates sports the digits on his game-night hoodie. “A lot of people don’t talk about Fort Worth football,” he said. “My goal was to create that conversation and to let people know on this side of the Metroplex, we play football, too.”
North Crowley has been consistently in third place in Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Class 6A rankings this season behind Duncanville and Galena Park North Shore—ever since the Panthers knocked DeSoto from number one.
In the coming weeks, the teens from 817 should have the opportunity to extend their winning streak deep into the playoffs and possibly all the way to a state championship.
