“I’m very excited for football season,” said Jessa Bell, a senior cheerleader at Canadian High School. “We’ve been doing a lot to get ready.”
Bell’s sentiment is shared by many CHS Wildcats fans from the Texas Panhandle town, with the team playing its first game Thursday in Elk City. In fact, the enthusiasm for high school football in Canadian this year likely exceeds that at many other Texas schools—only in Canadian, it has almost nothing to do with returning starters or a chance to make the playoffs.
The Bells were among the more than fifty families in and around Canadian who lost their homes to the Smokehouse Creek wildfire six months ago. The fire, considered the largest in Texas history, raged over slightly more than one million acres, destroying ranchland and killing thousands of cattle. In Canadian and other areas hit by the fire, the flames spread so fast that residents could gather only a few of their belongings before abandoning the homes they then lost. Two people died because of the fire, neither of them in or near the town of roughly 2,300.
Bell, who’s a pitcher and middle infielder on the Lady Cats softball team, differed in her response to the event from many other residents who were left homeless. She’s been displaced since the afternoon of February 27, and it took until just a couple of weeks ago before she could bring herself to look at where her home of six years once stood.
“I had been refusing to go back,” she said. “I went to go look at the progress of our rebuilding.” Bell saw the metal framing for the family’s new barndominium where their home had previously stood. “It’s good,” she said. “We’ll be in it in a few months.”
The athletic program at Canadian High was already experiencing a time of heightened emotions before the fire. In April 2023, Chris Koetting, the school’s football coach and athletic director, stunned residents by announcing he was retiring at age 54. Koetting averaged more than twelve wins a year over thirteen seasons at Canadian, with three state championships and ten trips to the semifinals. He was an assistant coach on two previous Wildcats state title teams (2007 and 2008) under former coach Kyle Lynch, who installed the up-tempo offense the team still uses.
Koetting explained in a statement that he was retiring because of cognitive issues and a likely diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Koetting told Texas Monthly recently: “I needed to step away because I wasn’t going to be what I needed to be, what I wanted to be, had always been.”
Defensive coordinator Andy Cavalier succeeded Koetting as both football coach and AD and led the Wildcats to an undefeated 2023 regular season and a second consecutive trip to the class 3A Division II state semifinals, where the Wildcats fell short against the eventual champs from Gunter High School in North Texas. “These were two very difficult situations, but through that was a display of a lot of love and a lot of caring,” Cavalier said. “And that was heartwarming.”
The Smokehouse Creek fire began near Stinnett, about eighty miles west of Canadian. The following morning, most CHS students received the first notice of potential danger on their mobile phones.
Jessa Bell didn’t see that. She didn’t have her phone, because she was taking the ACT. She said students in that room were advised to finish the test unless they lived in the path of the fire, which she did. She went with her parents and sister Kendall to Perryton, northwest of town. They waited for hours, eventually hearing hopeful rumors that their home had been spared.
Then a neighbor texted: We’re so sorry.
“That’s when we knew that our house had burned,” Bell said. Their home was about seven miles northwest of Canadian. The fire had also approached from the south. In that path was the rural home of the Purcells. Sons T.J. and Donnie run for the Wildcats cross-country team, and Donnie also plays football.
The Purcells moved there—into their dream home—in 2008. The house was 2,400 square feet, with a wraparound porch and an in-ground pool, on ten acres. “We worked on it little by little by little [and] made the final house payment last December,” said the boys’ mother, Darlene, standing on the land they still own. “We lost everything except for that barn out there.”
The Purcells spent about a month in the local Best Western before converting part of the barn into a two-bedroom space for the boys while Darlene and husband Bill made do in a new camper, bought with insurance money. They parked it in the barn. Only weeks ago, the family settled into a two-thousand-square-foot modular home that a truck hauled more than three hundred miles to Canadian from the Metroplex.
Football and cross-country could provide a degree of normalcy for the boys; T.J. also plays clarinet in the marching band. “I was real proud of how they handled the whole thing,” said Bill, who was hospitalized with smoke inhalation. “I wouldn’t say they were spoiled [before the fire], but they had it pretty good. When this hit, they lost everything they had. They lost their safe space. They manned up through the whole thing.”
The Purcells’ property is located a few hundred feet from what was the home of Kamden Sanchez, a senior lineman for the Wildcats. “At first, I was in shock,” Sanchez said. “I really didn’t know what to think.”
His family is staying in a rental home that the community furnished. They plan to rebuild. “Every time there’s a fire, it never heads into town or hits us,” Sanchez said. “I thought everything was going to be okay. I thought all my stuff was going to be all right. Then it just wasn’t, and went down to nothing.” He added: “I’m really excited for football.”
Brooke and Brynne Krehbiel are running cross-country this fall with sneakers they received when school officials took students who’d lost everything in the fire on shopping trips to places as far away as Amarillo, a hundred miles southwest of Canadian. The girls’ older sister, Bralee Crossland, was a senior on the tennis team when the family settled into temporary housing this spring. “It was almost like she got cheated out of her senior year,” said Frank Krehbiel, the girls’ father.
An older brother, Trae Dwyer-Krehbiel, played on Canadian’s state championship football teams in 2014 and 2015, as well as on the school’s boys basketball teams that won state in those school years—the only such double-double in UIL history. All of the children’s UIL medals were hanging on bedroom walls and lost when the fire swept through town. Trae’s championship rings were in a safe. “But they could stand only so much heat,” said his mother, Lindsy Krehbiel.
“The kids’ friends and their teachers and the coaches were very supportive. The whole community was,” she added. “They raised money for our family. Everyone has been very giving. We are blessed to call Canadian home.”
The boys basketball team was scheduled to play a third-round playoff game against Shallowater in Amarillo the night of the fire. The game was rescheduled, and Shallowater won 50–34. “It just felt like everything was frozen,” said Riggs Pennington, the Wildcats’ six-foot-eight center (and defensive end on the football team). “It didn’t feel like you were fixin’ to play a game. Just kind of stunned.”
Shallowater’s school district donated $15,000 to wildfire-relief efforts in Canadian.
The field at Wildcat Stadium was named for Koetting last fall during a halftime ceremony at Canadian’s final home game. The plan to honor the coach appears to have come together soon after Koetting announced his retirement. Trey Zenor, a 1993 Canadian High graduate who runs a local auto repair shop, posted on Facebook: “Coach Koetting deserved some recognition, and the sooner the better.”
Current student Tate Wilhelm then created an online petition, which he said received more than four hundred signatures, plus a few unsolicited donations. “As someone who’s not even in athletics,” said Wilhelm, lead programmer on the school robotics team, “I recognize Coach Koetting is not only an amazing coach but an outstanding member of our community and role model for students in my school.” Wilhelm’s home was also lost in the fire.
When Canadian’s football field was dedicated in Koetting’s name, the coach was introduced with his wife, Rosemary (who teaches health science at the school), and other family members. Several of Koetting’s former players walked out onto the field to join them. “It was awesome,” Koetting said.
Last month, Koetting was inducted into the Texas High School Coaches Association Hall of Honor during a ceremony in San Antonio. The Koettings learned of the honor last December on their thirty-first wedding anniversary; the former high school sweethearts started dating while attending Panhandle High, about 75 miles southwest of Canadian.
In June, doctors confirmed that Koetting had early-onset Alzheimer’s. Rosemary said the diagnosis provided a measure of relief. “Now he’s hopefully going to be started on some of the new medicine,” she said. “There’s not a cure, but there are medicines that can get some more time to get some things done. We’re kind of excited about that.”
During Koetting’s first season in retirement, last fall, the coach attended home football games at every level and made it to all but one of the varsity team’s road games. He showed up at many evening practices during this summer’s preseason, often seated high in Wildcat Stadium’s west stands, where the shade provided by a grove of cottonwood trees offered a measure of protection from August’s searing heat.
“When you retire, the hardest thing,” he said softly, is that “your best friends are your coaches. The hardest thing has been not being around those coaches every day.
“I had my time,” he said. “Had a lot of fun. I’m a person that’s very optimistic.”
