How Andale built a football machine: Inside Kansas’ most dominant dynasty

Long before Andale launched one of the most dominant runs in Kansas high school football history, legendary coach Paul Schmidt stopped a practice to deliver a lesson that sounded more like physics than football.

Schmidt, who doubled as a science teacher, explained how water needs a surge of energy to reach its boiling point and then demands even more to stay there.

Most of the teenagers probably missed the weight of that message. The coaches did not. They still remember it as the blueprint for everything that followed.

Reaching a championship level demands an exhausting amount of work. Sustaining it requires even more. Championships don’t repeat themselves. Dynasties don’t run on autopilot.

From the outside, people see the dominance under head coach Dylan Schmidt — the 110-4 record over the last nine seasons, the six Class 3A titles in seven years, the 57-game winning streak — and assume it must be easy. And as the 2025 team rolled to another unbeaten season, capped by a 38-6 win over Topeka Hayden, a new wave of skepticism and criticism washed over Andale: complaints about scheduling, whispers about recruiting, theories about unfair advantages.

But behind the lopsided victories and rows of trophies sits a community that treats football like a shared responsibility, a coaching staff obsessed with the smallest details and a program built on a simple truth: nothing great sustains itself without constant heat.

To understand how Andale became a machine, and why it keeps humming with no end in sight, you have to step inside the world outsiders never get to see.

Section I: The Andale way

To understand Andale football, you first have to understand Andale.

It sits as a blue-collar pocket of Sedgwick County, a triangle of Andale (pop: 927), Colwich (pop: 1,455) and St. Marks (pop: 124), where hard work isn’t a slogan. It defines home, school and sports. The football program isn’t an exception to the community’s identity. It’s a reflection of it.

“It all starts with the parents at home,” head coach Dylan Schmidt said. “If parents want their kids to be part of a program and work hard and be coached hard, then it’s going to happen.”

In Andale, it happens everywhere. Parents run the booster-club steak feed every August that raises thousands for school athletics. Moms cook Thursday-night team meals. Dads coach the youth teams in the Andale Cougars program. During the playoffs, parents fire up grills not just for Andale players, but for visiting teams too.

The household ethos becomes the program ethos. Kids arrive in the football locker room having already lived the values the coaches preach.

“A lot of our parents, they farm and they’re a fireman or they farm and pour concrete or they work an insurance business and do something else,” longtime defensive coordinator Tim Fairchild said. “Our kids see their parents work two jobs and how much time and energy and effort it takes to be successful. It’s not, ‘Do as I say.’ It’s ‘Do as I do.’”

By the time they reach high school, the fundamentals are in place. Work is expected. Sacrifice is normal. Accountability is part of being on a team.

“Working hard is just the expectation here,” Andale senior Emery Kraft said. “It’s a lot of blue-collar work. Nobody is sitting around all summer. We just build hard workers, that’s what Andale does.”

Because families reinforce the same standards, Schmidt and his staff coach with a freedom most high school programs never experience. Discipline isn’t a negotiation. Demanding effort isn’t controversial. The adults at home don’t undermine him, they reinforce him.

“I once heard that your best assistant coaches are going to be your parents,” assistant coach Tyler Ryan said. “They’re either going to help you or hurt you. And these parents help us so much.”

The synergy extends across every sport. Andale’s athletics function like a single organism: basketball, wrestling, baseball, volleyball, track, softball and football all speak the same cultural language. Standards carry over from season to season. Coaches work with each other, not against each other.

And it’s far from just a football phenomenon. Andale has piled up state titles recently in volleyball, track and field, wrestling, bowling and softball.

In most places, championships are brief windows. In Andale, the foundation was poured long before this era of football dominance. The culture was in place waiting for the next group to inherit it.

That is the starting point for understanding the machine. The next part, the part that turns expectations into undeniable results, happens inside the weight room.

Section II: Where the work gets done

If the community shapes the values of Andale football, the weight room hardens them into something opponents cannot replicate.

In the summer, Andale High School might as well be a YMCA with the lights permanently on. Weight-lifting sessions begin at 5:45 a.m. and roll deep into the afternoon. Athletes from every sport cycle in and out, but the football team sets the tone: this past summer, attendance hovered at 99%.

Optional, in Andale, doesn’t exist.

“If they’re not at those sessions,” Schmidt said, “I’ll call them, ‘Let’s just not play. Because it’s not going to work out here.’”

Once school begins, Andale’s 5-by-5 block schedule, with 75-minute classes, gives the program a built-in advantage over most 3A schools that have classes around 55 minutes. With every football player taking the weight-training course, it essentially gives Andale athletes 20 extra minutes of lifting every day, 100 extra minutes every week and the equivalent of an additional year and a half of weight training over the span of a four-year career.

At most 3A schools, having a couple of players who can hang-clean 300 pounds would be exceptional. At Andale, Schmidt says they have 10.

Rival coaches see the difference.

“You can study their formations and know what plays are coming, but you still have to stop it,” Collegiate coach Troy Black said. “It’s near impossible. It goes back to what they do in the weight room.”

The strength numbers are only the surface layer. What truly separates Andale is how Schmidt has engineered the weight room into a competitive ecosystem.

Summer workouts become their own season. Players are divided into teams led by assistant coaches and every missed session costs your team points. Accountability becomes peer-driven. Attendance becomes a source of pride. It builds camaraderie. It builds habits. It builds the expectation that hard work is not an act of self-sacrifice, but a shared obligation.

This spring, Schmidt added another dimension: technology. With the arrival of Perch, a velocity-based system that measures bar speed and power output, every rep is logged, track and compared. Strength becomes quantifiable. Power becomes competitive. Bragging rights become immediate.

Schmidt was already convinced the program had an elite lifting culture. Perch has pushed it even further.

But the machine does not run on strength alone. It runs on development, a quiet, systematic process that Schmidt considers the “secret sauce” of Andale football.

The freshmen and JV teams don’t exist to win. They exist to build. Every player rotates. Every player gets reps. Every player is treated as a future varsity contributor. Even with the rotation-heavy approach, Andale’s freshmen and JV teams went undefeated this season, beating several large-class opponents in the process, like Maize, Kapaun Mt. Carmel, Bishop Carroll and Eisenhower.

“I tell the coaches, ‘I will fire you if you don’t rotate kids,’” Schmidt said. “It’s all about player development.”

That development creates depth. Depth creates competition. Competition creates urgency. And urgency creates the kind of practices most 3A schools only wish they could simulate.

“Depth is where a lot of 3A programs are going to struggle because you only have 40 to 50 kids,” said Perry-Lecompton coach Mike Paramore, who battled against Andale in the 2020 state final. “It’s really hard to get those quality matchups in practice. You think about how good their practices have got to be with those numbers and that type of competition. It’s got to be fantastic.”

That depth shows up on Friday nights. While most 3A schools rely on their best athletes to play both ways, Andale can be selective. Andale is not always the bigger team, but it almost always wears opponents down because it is fresher, stronger and more physical for longer than the other team can handle.

That physicality is rooted in scheme, too. Andale is defiantly old-school, running a Robust T on offense and an aggressive, hard-nosed defense. Pancakes matter more than yards, takeaways more than tackles.

“Where your focus goes, your energy goes,” Fairchild likes to say.

The formula is simple, but exhausting: lift more, develop more, compete more and do it all with more effort and discipline than anyone else in 3A football.

And the person at the center of all of it, the one who refuses to let the machine idle for even a day, is next.

Section III: The Architect

Dylan Schmidt didn’t have to learn the Andale way. He was raised in it.

Now the 42-year-old stands at the center of it, the architect of the program’s daily standards, the keeper of its uncompromising expectations. A 2001 Andale graduate and former standout athlete, Schmidt now coaches the children of the same classmates he once lifted alongside in the old high school weight room.

He is fiery, animated and exacting, but also deeply connected to the place he leads. His authority doesn’t come from the titles he’s won, but from the fact that he understands the community because he comes from the community.

What separates Schmidt is not scheme. Andale still runs many of the same plays it used under former coach Gary O’Hair a decade ago. The brilliance is not in what Andale runs, it’s in how relentlessly Schmidt demands it is executed.

“What impresses me about Dylan is that he sets the standard and the rules, but then he spends the time to actually enforce them,” longtime defensive coordinator Tim Fairchild said. “A lot of coaches get worn out from that and they start letting things slide. They think they’re holding to it, but you can always do it at a higher standard.”

Schmidt doesn’t let things slide. Not conditioning. Not effort. Not film study. Not footwork. And especially not accountability.

Every Thursday, players take a written quiz on the game plan. If they fail, it doesn’t matter if they’re a freshman backup or a senior captain, they become the cleanup crew after the team meal. The athletes don’t resent that approach. They respect it. They grew up being told to work, so when Schmidt asks for more, it doesn’t feel foreign.

“When everybody sacrifices for the greater good, then you get unbelievable results,” Schmidt said. “But when you have selfish kids and ‘me’ people, you’re never going to get there.”

The most powerful example of Schmidt’s philosophy is not in a play call, but what he tracks on the whiteboard.

He does not post offensive statistics during the season, no touchdowns or rushing yards. The only stat that goes up in the locker room each week is pancakes. Linemen who record the most pancake blocks earn Gatorades and get to eat first at team meals, a small but symbolic privilege in a program that worships the grind more than the glory.

“At Andale, we probably get treated the best out of any offensive lineman in the state,” senior lineman Emery Kraft said. “We get awards for pancakes and get to eat at the front of the line. It’s really great what coach Schmidt does to let us be in the spotlight because most times offensive linemen don’t really get that praise.”

That consistency creates buy-in. It also eliminates ego.

Most dominant programs are driven by stars. Andale’s stars matter, too. Players like Sam Harp, Jack Horsch and Hunter Grimes would succeed on any roster in Kansas. But the soul of Andale’s dominance lives in its middle tier: the grinders.

Despite the perception that Andale is loaded with blue-chip talent, the truth is the opposite: the program rarely produces Division I football players. The dynasty wasn’t built on superstars, it was built on developing the kind of kids every school has.

Assistant coach Tyler Ryan, who was a head coach at Wichita Trinity at Wellington, has seen the contrast.

“What Dylan does better than anyone is taking the average player that everybody has and develop them,” Ryan said. “We get more out of those kids than anybody else.”

Schmidt doesn’t wait for talent to emerge. He extracts it. Through the weight room. Through the reps at the freshmen and JV levels. Through the Thursday quizzes. Through the expectation that there is always another level to reach. By the time a player reaches varsity, he doesn’t resemble who he was as a freshman. He resembles what the system shaped him to be.

To maintain the standard, Schmidt works constantly. He isn’t exaggerating when he says he tries to improve something every single day of the year, whether it be a tweak to the practice script, a shift in the lifting curriculum, a new accountability tool, a culture conversation with a staff member. It is a grind that exhausts lesser coaches.

“People think we just show up and win, but they have no idea,” Schmidt said. “The grind never ends. It absolutely never ends.”

And that grind has a cost. Schmidt acknowledges the strain — on his marriage, on family time, on personal balance — but he doesn’t know any other way. He lives for the challenge, for the process, for the adrenaline that only comes with running out on the football field before a game.

“I’m living for the Friday nights,” Schmidt said. “I still get goosebumps. I still get nerves. I just love running out there on that field. There’s no place I’d rather be.”

Schmidt refuses to view his accomplishment as a dynasty. To him, a dynasty implies finality, a completed arc. In his mind, he only sees an ongoing chase.

Perfection is the standard and perfection is always out of reach. So the pursuit becomes the mission, the reason that Schmidt is as hungry as ever when it seems like, from the outside, that he has reached the peak.

“Whenever I hear people say, ‘Wow, it looks so easy,’” Schmidt said. “I just think, ‘Well, yeah, if you’re willing to put in all the work that we put in, sure, things probably do get a little easier on Friday nights.’”

And that identity flows from one person. The community may shape the program’s values. The weight room may forge its physical edge. But Schmidt is the one who binds it all, demanding, and enforcing, the consistency needed to keep this machine running.

Section IV: The noise

For all the trophies Andale has hoisted, success has come with an echo. A steady hum of criticism, suspicion and outside noise that trails every blowout and every championship season.

As the program’s margins of victory widened and its win totals swelled, so did the theories. Some accused Andale of recruiting. Others whispered about steroids. A few insisted the team dominated only because it played in Class 3A and would fold in a higher classification. The details changed depending on the storyteller, but the implication was always the same: Andale must be cutting corners.

Inside the program, the reaction is always the same: amusement.

“It’s such a loser’s limp,” Schmidt said. “It’s people who can’t figure it out and they can’t get it done, so they decide Andale must be cheating. Honestly, it’s just fuel to the fire for us.”

The players laugh, too. They’ve seen the comments on social media. The screenshots bounce through group chats during the season, a running joke among teenagers who laugh at the idea that anyone who actually saw Andale’s workload could believe it comes from anything other than dedication.

“We just laugh about it because those people have never been to a place where people actually work hard,” senior lineman Emery Kraft said. “They can’t understand that we just put in the time and the work every single day.”

The coaches who have prepared to face Andale don’t buy the myths, either. They’ve seen the film. They’ve studied the details. They’ve felt the relentlessness on Friday nights.

“Sometimes as coaches, we get a little too caught up in thinking we’ve got to do something elaborate,” said Perry-Lecompton coach Mike Paramore, who lost twice to Andale in state finals. “At the end of the day, football is still won by blocking and tackling and playing with great effort. When I think about playing Andale, I think about the word ‘relentless.’”

And then there are the words of a man who helped write the earliest chapters of the Andale standard.

“It’s so hard when you’re on top to stay on top and not become complacent,” said former coach Gary O’Hair, who won three state titles during his 15-year run in Andale from 2002-16. “You have every coach in the state of Kansas trying to figure out how to beat you every offseason. Every team in the state has the Andale game highlighted. Everyone wants to beat you, so you have to be at your best all the time. That’s what is so amazing about what they’re doing.”

And with that type of success comes more criticism, not rooted in football itself, but with scheduling.

Why doesn’t Andale play up? Why not schedule the big schools? Why not try to prove it against higher classifications?

The truth is simple: Andale has tried, repeatedly, but its hands are also tied.

Classifications are determined by KSHSAA using enrollment numbers. Andale, currently the second-largest school in Class 3A football, is locked into district play — meaning four of its eight regular-season games are set before Schmidt can even think about calling opponents.

The scheduling window, for Andale, opens in mid-October at the annual KSHSAA scheduling meeting in Salina. That’s when coaches from 3A, 2A and 1A finally learned which Fridays they have open. By then? The larger schools in 4A, 5A and 6A that aren’t bound by district play have already filled their schedules.

Schmidt still tries. He has reached out to more than a dozen bigger programs, asking if they would reshuffle dates or find a creative solution. All declined. Some wouldn’t even entertain the idea.

The myths persist anyway.

What Schmidt finds ironic is that the doubt often comes from people who believe Andale wins because the works is easy. The assumption is that all the team must do is show up, then the talent takes care of everything, that dominance is effortless.

He knows the danger in that thinking, not for outsiders, but for his own players. The kind of “rat poison” Nick Saban once famously warned about creeps in when a team wins that often.

“I get texts from my buddies, ‘Oh, you guys are going to win 100-0,’” Schmidt said. “If I’m hearing that stuff, what do you think our kids are being told?”

That’s where the real threat lies: the slow creep of complacency. So the coaching staff attacks it constantly. Every film session, every meeting, every practice carries the same uncompromising message — respect every opponent, even the ones outsiders dismiss, because this is the only team on the schedule this week, which means it is the best team you will play this week.

“We have to hammer it into our kids, ‘No, you’re not just going to show up,’” Schmidt said. “Other teams work hard too. And they’re tired of hearing about Andale. They’re ready to take over our spot.”

Even Andale’s own community feels the effects of such sustained success. Blowouts have become so routine that home crowds swell only when a marquee opponent comes to town. Drama is rare. One-score games even rarer. The program has played just seven games decided by one possession in its 114 under Schmidt, excellence so extreme that it has, at times, dulled the tension that fuels most small towns on Friday nights.

The noise has surrounded Andale for years now, but none of it has altered how the program prepares. If anything, it has clarified that the program’s greatest threat isn’t from the outside, but from the slow creep of complacency from within — the fight that defines what comes next.

Section V: The perpetual chase

Andale’s dynasty has rarely cracked, but when it did, the fracture revealed what truly holds it together.

The two losses to Cheney during the 2023 season became one of the quiet turning points in the Schmidt era. They not only snapped a 57-game winning streak, but they ruptured the myth of invincibility that had grown around the program. For the first time in years, Andale was forced to stew with a feeling it had nearly forgotten.

Inside the program, it didn’t spark panic. It sparked honesty. Had they stopped pouring enough energy into keeping the water boiling?

Coaches didn’t overhaul schemes or rewrite the playbook. The correction was subtler: a return to the uncomfortable clarity that had built the program in the first place. The mistakes weren’t systemic. They were microscopic: an angle here, a rep there, a level of urgency they refused to let slip again. It was a reminder to everyone that there is no shortcut to success.

“Imagine having this recipe for the best pancakes you’ve ever had, but then somebody says you don’t have to put the sugar in,” Schmidt said. “That’s bull crap. You 100% have to put the sugar in. That’s why they’re the best pancakes.”

Sustaining this level doesn’t get easier as the trophies pile up. It gets harder. The effort compounds. The pressure refines. And the emotional bandwidth required to stay sharp grows heavier, not lighter.

“The energy that it takes to stay at the top is so much harder and so much more demanding than the energy it takes to get there once,” Andale defensive coordinator Tim Fairchild said.

Once the program recommitted to those tiny ingredients, the response was overwhelming. Since those Cheney losses, Andale has reeled off 26 straight wins by a combined margin of 1,510-224, claiming back-to-back state titles and restoring the kind of suffocating dominance the state had come to expect.

Even as the wins stack up, Schmidt keeps a quiet distance from the idea that any of this defines him. He loves Andale. He loves the competition, the preparation, the Friday nights under the lights. But he refuses to let a scoreboard shape his identity.

“As much as I love winning, this isn’t the most important thing I do,” Schmidt said. “Football is not the end-all, be-all. It’s what we do, but it’s not everything.”

That perspective is not a disclaimer. It is the pressure valve that allows andale to sustain excellence without suffocating under it. If winning were everything, the dynasty would collapse under the expectations. Instead, Schmidt stripes the weight off his players and reminds them that joy comes not from the results but from the process behind it.

By every external measure, Schmidt should feel like he is at the mountaintop.

He has engineered one of the most dominant stretches in Kansas high school football history. His teams don’t just win, they flatten opponents. They erase hope by halftime. They leave entire seasons feeling preordained. The 2025 season, another perfect one, only elevated his standing more.

But that’s where people misunderstand him most.

Schmidt loves competition. He loves the nerves that hit when he runs onto the field. He loves the collision of preparation and performance. And of course, he loves winning.

But fulfillment? That doesn’t come from holding a trophy.

“In the end, when you get the job done, it’s an unbelievable feeling,” Schmidt said. “But it’s a very fleeting feeling.”

His joy has never been rooted in the outcome. It lives in the process, the year-round grind, the discipline, the development, the pursuit of a standard they will never fully reach. That pursuit is what gives Andale its edge. It is also what gives Schmidt his peace.

How long will the machine run? No one knows. Dynasties that feel eternal rarely are. And even programs with the strongest cultural roots eventually meet the erosion of time.

But that’s the paradox that makes Schmidt’s story so compelling: he’s obsessed with the chase, but not consumed by the result.

The wins matter, but they are not the measure. The championships matter, but they are not the point. Schmidt makes sure his players understand that, especially when the stakes are highest.

“I told our kids the morning before the state game, ‘Football is important, but this is not the most important thing you’ll do in your life,’” Schmidt said.

“I hope that is as freeing for them as it is for me.”

This story was originally published December 11, 2025 at 6:02 AM.

Taylor Eldridge

The Wichita Eagle

316-268-6270

Wichita State athletics beat reporter. Bringing you closer to the Shockers you love and inside the sports you love to watch.