‘Eldo’s back’: How these high school football players ended a 51-year playoff drought
In El Dorado, being a football player has never really been something to be proud about.
Since the Kansas State High School Activities Association started its playoff system in 1969, El Dorado never won a postseason game in the following 51 seasons. It’s a streak that seems impossible until you consider the program only had 11 winning seasons during that span.
When current El Dorado senior Zach Wittenberg wore his letter jacket around school, he used to tell classmates he was more of a basketball player. Who could blame him? Wittenberg’s class did not win a football game while they were in middle school.
It once seemed impossible to Wittenberg — and decades of players before him — that he would ever attain football success at El Dorado. Yet, there he was last Friday evening with his helmet raised in front of Wildcats fans who roared in approval as the community celebrated El Dorado’s first playoff victory, a 46-14 thumping of Winfield in the Class 4A opening round.
“I never would have ever dreamed I would be here my senior year,” said Wittenberg, who has rushed for 1,198 yards in seven games. “I would have never believed you if you told me this is where we would be four years ago.”
“People have been waiting a long time for us, but Eldo’s back,” senior Dravin Fowler declared.
Here’s the story on how a listless high school football program in the Wichita suburbs made the drastic and historic turnaround to go from the inconsequential to the pride of the community.
‘There’s something in the water’
After 15 years coaching college football, with the last decade as defensive coordinator at Central Missouri and Missouri Western, Wes Bell was ready to transition into a different chapter.
He wanted to be a better husband to his wife, Rebecca, and a better father to their two boys, which meant giving up the year-round grind of recruiting in college football. But Bell, 41, still wanted to coach and began looking at high school openings.
He soon developed two priorities: 1. He wanted to stay close to Wichita, where his parents lived, and 2. He wanted to coach in a town with only one high school.
By his own definition, El Dorado was the perfect match. And he also knew the athletic director, Scott Vang, from recruiting Vang’s sons in college. But Bell also knew that El Dorado had gone through six different head coaches in the prior 10 seasons with a combined record of 16-74.
In doing his due diligence, Bell called coaches who had failed to turn around the program.
“One guy told me that there’s something in the water,” Bell said. “That’s why everyone is so little.”
Gary Melcher has been a mainstay in the El Dorado community. He’s been coaching a variety of sports there since 1974, including a four-year stint as the head football coach from 1984-87, and he has heard similar theories about El Dorado football.
El Dorado actually had a 12-year stretch, from 1989 to 2000, where it had a winning record in seven of those seasons. But over the last two decades, Melcher said he’s watched El Dorado’s enrollment plummet and participation dwindle, a combination that led to the downward spiral.
“The towns around Wichita continued to grow (in the 2000s) and we were outside of that loop, so not only did our population not grow but we lost kids,” Melcher said. “Our kids always worked hard, but we struggle to compete because of sheer numbers.
“If there’s two football players out of every 10 students and we’re working with half the numbers of everybody else and you take 10 years worth of being outnumbered, then you get to a point where the kids quit believing.”
Bell was not deterred. He accepted the job last February.
.jpeg "image0 (4).jpeg")
‘We’re not winning the get-off-the-bus award’
The problem in the El Dorado football program wasn’t that the players didn’t work hard or want to be good, it was that the players didn’t understand the discipline and effort required to be good.
They learned that the hard way during their first practice with Bell last summer.
The practice plan that day called for a short period of stretches followed with most of the time spent in the weight room. The team never made it to the weight room that day. Bell made it clear the expectations were changing by keeping the players on the field for one hour and 38 minutes until he was satisfied with how they were completing the warm-up stretches. The same stretching routine takes the team less than eight minutes to complete today.
“We were all kind of surprised because we had never seen something like that,” Wittenberg said. “But over the next few weeks, we realized what he was doing. He was holding up to a higher expectation and we just followed through with it and kept getting better and better.”
Nearly two years later, with El Dorado preparing to host a home playoff game in November with a 5-2 record, Bell said he and the players laugh when they reflect on their first practice. But the message on the first day was sent: this is the new standard for how El Dorado was going to attack every task — from stretching to lifting weights to practicing.
“If I can’t trust a kid to do the warm-up right, you sure as heck can’t trust him to run the right route or blitz the right gap,” Bell said. “We put a system in place teaching kids how to do stuff the right way. We concentrate on the little, finite details because… I love El Dorado and I love our kids, but we’re not going to line up and out-athlete anybody right now. We’re not winning the get-off-the-bus award.
“But our kids play really hard and details and discipline are what are helping us level the playing field right now.”
That’s also the reason for why Bell installed the flexbone offense, which he calls “the great equalizer.” The Wildcats haven’t been bigger, faster or stronger than their opposition this season, but they are disciplined enough to execute the deceptive offense at a high level.
El Dorado is averaging 352 rushing yards per game, despite possessing one of the smallest — both in total size and in physical size — 4A rosters. There are only 18 upperclassmen and 44 players total in the program, from varsity to junior varsity to freshmen. The two starting tackles on the offensive line measure 5-foot-9, 195 pounds and 5-foot-10, 187 pounds.
“Football is not an easy game and in a place where you haven’t won a whole lot, kids aren’t fired up to come out and run full speed at another human being and get walloped,” Bell said.
Bell is still trying to establish his standards on El Dorado’s weight-lifting programs and youth football teams and he is optimistic that a winning season like this can accelerate that process of making El Dorado a consistent winner, rather than just a one-off success this season.
“We’re a year ahead of schedule for what I had in my head,” Bell said. “I knew we would be able to compete a little more this year, but I wasn’t certain where we would be. We’re still not the biggest club, but God dang, our kids work their tails off. The future is pretty bright for us.”
.jpeg "image0 (3).jpeg")
‘There’s nothing more miserable than not believing’
When Scott Vang arrived in El Dorado as the athletic director in 2018, the football program reminded him of the place where he just came from.
Back in 2012, Vang, then a head football coach, took over a Goddard program that had won just nine games the previous four years. It took Vang four years to eradicate the losing mentality and lead Goddard to a winning record, then in the fifth season the Lions came inches away from winning the Class 5A championship.
Before the Goddard players believed a championship was possible, Vang said the biggest challenge in turning around the program was making the kids understand the level they have to work consistently to achieve success. He sees Bell already making strides in that category in just his second year in El Dorado.
“Coach Bell has done a great job of getting the kids and their families to buy in and be willing to challenge themselves,” Vang said. “We have great kids. We have a great community. We have a great facility. It’s not that they didn’t want to win, but they didn’t understand the effort it took and he has done a great job of selling the idea that hard work pays off. The kids understand now that if they don’t put in the effort, they’ll never turn the corner.”
Bell credits his group of assistant coaches — Cade Armstrong (a former successful head coach at Andover), Brandon Wise, Dylan Richardson, Dustin Avery and Chuck Bisbee — for helping him establish that winning culture.
Like with any drastic change in a program, there have been a few players who have quit.
“This isn’t the YMCA. It’s not some rec league,” Bell said. “We’re trying to be a competitive high school football program and I’m not going to lower our standards.”
The current players said it took a little while to adjust to those standards, but once they adapted, they noticed a change in the team’s overall mentality. They no longer hoped they could win. They expected it.
“Every time we get the ball now, we’re expecting first downs, we’re expecting touchdowns,” El Dorado senior Dravin Fowler said.
“I think the biggest thing the coaches did was change the whole mindset of our team,” Wittenberg said. “When he got here, the first thing he told us was that we were going to learn to expect to win every game. He had that college experience, so we believed him. And now I’m just so happy that they got this thing turned around.”
Under Bell, the football players are strongly encouraged to be three-sport athletes. Bell thinks the work ethic and winning mentality will not only benefit the Wildcats during football season, but the players will carry those traits over to help their teams in winter and spring sports at El Dorado.
Gary Melcher, who is entering his 47th year as a coach at El Dorado, has seen a good football team spur success in other sports at the school.
After so many decades of often seeing the look of defeat in El Dorado football players, Melcher said he finally sees a shift to a winning attitude under Bell.
“There’s nothing more miserable than not believing,” Melcher said. “That’s why I’m so happy for our kids. I think the coaches have turned them into believers and you’re a lot better equipped to accomplish good things when you believe that you can.”
.jpeg "image0 (1).jpeg")
‘Enjoy every minute of it’
Kai Fowler can still remember the goosebumps.
The year was 1997 and Fowler was a senior linebacker for the El Dorado football team, which was the talk of the town after the Wildcats had won eight straight games to finish the regular season 8-1, including winning a league championship, and were set to host a first-round playoff game.
The football players had just finished a team dinner in the basement of a local church and they got chills as they were walking up the stairs to go outside.
“We just heard a bunch of roaring,” Fowler said. “They had this huge pep rally in the parking lot with students and people in the community. The football team was a big deal back then. It was a lot of fun.”
Little did he know at the time, but it would be the last playoff game hosted by El Dorado for another 23 years.
Back in 1997, Fowler and Reggie Rice were a terrifying tandem for opponents making plays for El Dorado at linebacker. More than two decades later, Fowler and Rice at linebacker are again making plays for the Wildcats.
Both Fowler and Rice had sons who followed in their father’s footsteps: Dravin Fowler is a senior linebacker for El Dorado and Jalen Rice is a sophomore linebacker. The duo ranks second and third on the team in tackles this season. Fowler also has a younger son, Trace, on the team and his daughter, Leila, is a team manager.
“There’s a vibe in El Dorado again and it’s very exciting to see,” Rice said. “It’s exciting to see the community come together, just like they did back when we were in school. I’m so excited, I want to run out on the field with them.”
Fowler and Rice have taken immense pride in seeing the football program restored to the winning ways they were accustomed to, even if it meant swallowing their own pride when their sons claimed bragging rights after winning their playoff game.
El Dorado earned the No. 3 seed in the Class 4A West bracket, which earned them another home playoff game this Friday against Wamego (5-4).
Win or lose, history has already been made.
“It has been so special to watch this with my son being a senior,” Kai Fowler said. “I told him to enjoy every minute of it because me and my buddies still talk about our year together. We still sit around and have a good time and talk about all of the games and all of the memories. This is something him and his teammates will be able to remember forever.”
.jpg)