Gary Gaines Death has shocked the football community a lot. This gives us the opportunity to remember him and his past to give peace to his soul.
Gary Gaines was an American football coach. He was born on May 4, 1949, and died on August 22, 2022. Gaines was the head coach of the 1988 Permian High School football team.
This team was the subject of the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by Buzz Bissinger and the movie Friday Night Lights, starring Billy Bob Thornton, which came out in 2004. Over the course of 40 years, he was a coach at eight high schools and two colleges in Texas.
What About Early Years Of Life
Gaines was born in 1949. He played football for his high school team, the Crane Golden Cranes, and then for the Angelo State Rams.
Former Odessa Panthers coach Ron King told local news after Gaines’ death, “I was there when he was inducted into the Texas High School Coaches Hall of Fame.” “I can’t find the right words to say goodbye. It’s a big loss for people who work as coaches. He took a lot of coaches under his wing and helped them grow. A lot of his coaches were young. He was a person who made a difference, like when you coach kids and try to make a difference. I think that’s what Coach Gaines did.”
When He Took Coaching As A Job
Gaines taught high school for 30 years at different high schools in West Texas. In 1971, he started his career at Fort Stockton High School. For the next five years, he taught at Monahans High School. In 1977, he got his first job as a head coach at Petersburg High School.
He went on to be the head coach at Denver City High School in 1978, Amarillo Tascosa High School in 1982, Monahans from 1983 to 1985, Abilene High School from 1994 to 1995, and San Angelo Central High School in 1995. (1996–1999).
Odessa Permian
Most of Gaines’ fame came from his time at Odessa, Texas’s Permian High School. He was an assistant coach for three years, from 1979 to 1981, when Head Coach John Wilkins was in charge. In 1980, Permian won the Texas 5A state championship with Gaines on the team.
After Wilkins retired at the end of the 1985 season, Gaines went back to Permian as head coach. He took over a team that had gone to back-to-back 5A state championship games, where they tied with Beaumont French High School (there was no overtime in 1984, so the game ended 21–21) and lost to Houston Yates.
In H.G. Bissinger’s 1990 book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, Gaines was one of the main characters. The book told the story of Permian’s 1988 season and the football-crazy culture of West Texas. Gaines coached Permian to a perfect 16–0 season and the 5A state championship the following year. Gaines left Permian after the 1989 season, when he had a record of 46–7–1.
Coaching In The College
After the 1989 season, Gaines got his first college coaching job as the linebackers coach at Texas Tech University, where Spike Dykes was the head coach. Dykes was the head coach of Permian’s rival Midland Lee High School when Gaines was an assistant at Permian in the early 1980s. The Red Raiders went 27–30 in his five years at Tech and played in two bowl games, including the 1995 Cotton Bowl Classic.
After the 1994 season, Gaines left Texas Tech and was the head coach at Abilene High School from 1994 to 1995 and at Central High School from 1996 to 1999.
In January 2000, Gaines became the 17th head football coach at Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas. In Gaines’s first two years at ACU, the team had trouble and lost 17 of 21 games.
Even though they had some problems early on, the Wildcats turned things around in 2002, going 6–4 and winning the Lone Star Conference South Division Championship. This was the Wildcats’ first championship of any kind since 1977, when they won the Lone Star Conference Championship. At the end of the 2004 season, Gaines quit. His overall record was 21–30.
Go Back To The Permian
After Darren Allman left to coach at Austin Westlake, Permian announced on March 9, 2009, that Gaines would take over as head coach. Gaines had left Permian 20 years earlier, and it had been 10 years since he coached high school football. The Panthers could not match the success Gaines had in the 1980s. In four years, they went 23–21 and won just one playoff game. At the end of the 2012 season, Gaines gave up his job as head coach and said he was done coaching. Gaines had a 69–28–1 record at Permian over the course of eight seasons. In his 20 seasons as a head coach, he had a 127–93–5 record overall.
Career After Coaching
In 2005, Gaines started working as the athletic director for the Ector County Independent School District. Permian High School is in this district. In 2007, he was hired by the Lubbock Independent School District as its athletic director.
Gaines also spoke in public. Gaines talked about teamwork, leadership, winning, and being successful on and off the field at high schools and colleges all over the country.
What About Personal Life And Gary Gaines Death
Gaines was married to Sharon Gaines, and the two of them had two children and five grandchildren.
Gaines was inducted into the Angelo State University Hall of Honor in 2019 and the Texas High School Coaches Association Hall of Honor in 2013.
In 2017, Gaines said that he had been told he had Alzheimer’s disease that started early. Gary Gaines Death took place on August 22, 2022, at the age of 73, from the disease.
