Two coaches. One rival who lifted them both. Jeff Dixon and Joshua Potter tell the story of Sam Harrell of Ennis — in their own words.
In Texas high school football, a playbook is guarded like a state secret. Coaches move towns for jobs, fight for Friday nights, and measure their years in district titles. Rivals are rivals.
Which is what makes the story of Sam Harrell, the longtime coach at Ennis, so unusual. Ask the coaches who crossed his path what they remember, and they don’t start with the state championships. They start with a phone call, an open door, an open playbook.
Two of them told us their stories.
Before Jeff Dixon coached at Katy and Alvarado, he was a young head coach at Palmer — a small town sitting just up the road from Ennis — fighting, in his words, like crazy to find a way to win ball games.
“I was struggling as a young head coach… it was a time in my career in which I was questioning whether or not I even needed to coach.”
Some Palmer kids trained at the Ennis field house in the summers, and that’s where Dixon first met Harrell — barely more than a handshake. But when things got dark, it was Harrell he reached out to. He asked for a few minutes. He got more than that.
“He said, ‘Coach, you come talk to me any time.’ And I did. I opened my heart to him… he encouraged me, probably more than anything, to hang in there in this profession.”
That spring, Dixon decided to leave Palmer with no job lined up — he puts it simply: “I put it in God’s hands.” Then the phone rang.
“Hey — I may have a job for you.”
The job came open. Dixon took it and spent three years on Harrell’s staff — an established head coach who, as Dixon tells it, had no reason to take a chance on a beat-up young coach from up the road.
“He was already an established coach… but he valued me as a young guy. He didn’t have to do that. But he did.”
What Dixon took from Ennis wasn’t scheme. It was how Harrell treated people. The kid from the project homes who lived with his grandparents. The assistant, Paul Willingham, who was already in Ennis when Harrell arrived — and instead of being run off by the new head coach, ended up running his defense through the state-championship years.
“There’s been many a young life that are very successful today because he didn’t punt them down the road.”
Joshua Potter’s story starts on the other side of the ledger. He was a defensive coach at Brenham — a good team, a proud man-coverage team — when head coach Glenn West walked in with an admission: they needed to learn zone.
The best zone team around was Ennis. Same division. A team Brenham could realistically meet in the state championship. Potter and his staff went anyway.
“We could have very well been playing each other… I was always real tight and close to the vest. But Sam — he didn’t mind sharing, and trying to make us better.”
Harrell handed a potential playoff rival his own coaches — sit down with Willingham, talk to Steve Marrow, here’s how we run it. Years later, when Potter needed career advice, Harrell took that call too.
“You could tell — Sammy cared about people. And he cared about us.”
“Here’s this guy who I think is absolutely brilliant, and he’s willing to talk to me on the phone and just give me advice about coaching… it helped me to be that way too, with other people.”
A struggling head coach he barely knew. A rival who might have knocked him out of the playoffs. Sam Harrell opened the door to both — and both men spent the rest of their careers holding it open for somebody else.
When Dixon finally left Ennis for Katy, he says he and his wife cried — not about the move, but about what they were leaving: a staff, and a culture, that a coach who cared had built.
“We need more guys like Coach Harrell in this profession.”
Jeff Dixon
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