FAYETTEVILLE — Children’s books are a key to Billy Dawson’s success.
The first-year Fayetteville football coach has been motivating teenagers with everything from “By My Brother’s Side” by Tiki and Ronde Barber to the classic “The Little Engine That Could.”
It’s worked wonders. He’s won four state championships, including three at Nashville and one last season at 6A Russellville. He’s 175-54 as a head coach and has never lost in a state championship game.
Most of all, he gets people — especially his players — to love him and to love playing hard for him. His players gave the new coach a “ringing endorsement” last season.
“It was kind of funny seeing big ol’ senior offensive linemen walking around wearing silver bells last season,” said Al Ray Taylor, minister of music at Second Baptist Church in Russellville.
“The Polar Express” is a book and movie (starring Tom Hanks) about a boy who was pessimistic about Santa Claus and the North Pole. Santa gives the boy a silver bell, and the premise was “the bell only rings for those who truly believe.”
It may seem like an odd choice for high school football players, but it convinced the Cyclones to believe they could ring a state championship bell in December. That’s quite an accomplishment for a program that had won just 15 games in the previous five seasons before Dawson took over.
“They started thinking and believing, ‘Why not us? Why not now?’” Taylor said.
Dawson isn’t sure which book he’ll share with the Bulldogs this postseason but admits lessons learned from each book are not just for the players.
“It gets me every year,” said Dawson, a 1985 Bentonville High graduate. “It’s always a good message and a good reminder of some things we maybe take for granted, like last year with ‘The Polar Express’. It doesn’t matter what everybody says. The belief comes from within. Believing in your family and believing in the process.”
Those who know Dawson best say he’s an excellent communicator and master motivator, whether he’s encouraging from the sidelines or from the pulpit. He left coaching for two years to serve as a minister at Immanuel Baptist Church in Nashville.
While at Russellville, he doubled as the Cyclones’ football coach and a full-time pastor at Second Baptist, where he gave his last sermon in July. He said he returned to coaching because he missed the competitiveness and camaraderie with the players, the staff and their families, and because he could reach an even wider audience.
“Maybe the biggest ministry I could have is exactly what I’m doing now,” Dawson said. “I get to affect a lot of people at a lot of different places.”
Dawson loves his family and gives a ton of credit for his success to his wife, Karen, and children, Rachel and Luke, who’ll graduate from Ouachita Baptist University this spring. He said they’ve always been very involved in everything and a major part of everything they do.
Most of all, people say Dawson practices what he preaches.
“We had a cuss bucket that he never had to put any money into. And, of course, there were several others of us who contributed,” said Mike Stokes.
Stokes gave Dawson his first coaching gig as an assistant at Hampton, where Dawson also was head coach of the junior high team. Stokes recalls Dawson once making the star player “run an ungodly amount of laps” because of regular tardiness to practice. The star received the message and wasn’t late again.
“It did as much or more for the rest of the team because it showed them that even the best players were going to be treated like everyone else,” Stokes recalled.
Dawson returned the favor when he was head coach at Sheridan by hiring Stokes as an assistant. There, Stokes said the Yellowjackets won a lot of games they weren’t supposed to win because of Dawson’s ability to bring the best out of players by getting them to play harder than they’ve ever played before.
“He would make a speech each day before practice,” Stokes said. “And by the end, I was ready to go out on the field and hit somebody. He was so motivational to everyone, even those who weren’t involved with the football program.
“You just love being around that guy.”
Dawson didn’t begin his head coaching career as a master of all things about football and life. In 1992, Smackover interviewed six candidates for its opening. The other five turned the job down, Dawson said.
“So they hired a 24-year-old who didn’t know a football from a pear,” Dawson said. “Talk about learning the hard way.”
Smackover went 6-14 during two seasons and was Dawson’s only non-winning stint as a head coach. He didn’t lose that many games as a head coach over his next six seasons combined. That included two conference titles at Parkview Baptist in Baton Rouge, La., a conference championship at Lonoke and guiding Sheridan to the playoffs for the first time in 12 years.
He’s widely regarded as a program-builder, but taking over a Fayetteville program coming off back-to-back state championships offers another challenge.
“From the standpoint of where the program is, it is different,” Dawson said. “There’s some things we’re going to put our fingerprint on, but the program was in really good shape when we got here.”
One of those things is player development and not just on physical skills. Building character is important to Dawson. Although he never mixed football with his sermons, a favorite saying to players and churchgoers was the same: “Let your video match your audio.”
“His audio matches his video. He doesn’t just blow smoke,” Taylor said. “I love the guy. He has the ability to make you want to work for him. To make you want to please him. We saw that here every day, and he was always so prepared with PowerPoints with his sermons. There was very little work for the rest of us.
“I have no idea how he found the time to do it all and also be a head coach. I don’t know when he sleeps.”
Dawson said he sleeps four or five hours a night during the season but adds that he and his wife get plenty of rest because they’ve been doing it that way for so long. It’s just part of their lives.
His current players have witnessed Dawson’s preparation firsthand and say workouts are well regimented.
“It’s a little bit of a new system, but we’re all getting used to it,” said junior quarterback Darius Bowers. “I think practices are much faster. They’re really fast-paced. We’re always moving and always doing something. There’s not much standing around.
“I love coach Dawson. He’s very intelligent and already helped me improve so much as a player, and as a person.”
The Dawson File
Fayetteville’s Billy Dawson is 175-54 as a head coach
School................................................Year(s)................Record
Russellville..........................................2015-16 ......................17-8 Nashville..............................................2012-14 .....................26-9 Nashville..............................................2005-09.....................65-4 Siloam Springs......................................2004.........................8-3 Monroe (La.) Neville...............................2001 .........................10-3 Sheridan............................................1999-2000...................13-7 Lonoke ...................................................1998..........................7-4 Baton Rouge (La.) Parkview ...............1996-97..................... 23-2 Smackover..........................................1992-93.....................6-14 *Dawson also served as an assistant coach at Hampton
(1991), offensive cooridnator at Baton Rouge Parkview (1994-95) and offensive coridnator at Arkansas Tech (2002-03).
Between head coaching stints at Nashville, he was pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church (2010-11) in Nashville.
Mike Capshaw can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWACappy.