Perhaps when Donny Gray was hired as McMurry’s head football coach Nov. 29, some may have speculated that he was too young to be a head coach. What most don’t know is Gray began the journey to his first head coaching job much earlier than most. On Sept. 13, 1974 – just three days after he was born - he was at his first football game witnessing his father, Dwayne, coach at Amherst High School in his first year as a head coach.
Though Gray may not have been aware enough to know what was going on at three days of age, it wouldn’t be long before he was immersed in the game of football and in the world of coaching.
“In my elementary days, instead of going home after school I would go to the practice field,” said Gray whose father was a head football coach in Texas for 28 years beginning in 1974. “Growing up, whenever he would go to playoff games or go to scout games he would always take me with him. I was charting film and watching games from the time I can remember.”
As the son of a head coach all his life, Gray learned from his father early on that there was more to coaching football than wins and losses.
“He was the greatest influence in my life,” Donny said of his dad. “Growing up I got to see him influence players’ lives and alter the course of their lives for the better. Not just on the field; but in life there were a bunch of kids that might not have amounted to anything but he helped them to be really good people in the world.”
Gray said that his father showed him what it meant to work hard and what it meant to care about his players. Dwayne had a simple solution to the problem of balancing his job and his family: bring them together.
“He made everything about family,” said Donny. “I grew up in the field house and the players were like brothers if my sisters and I weren’t at the field house with them, they were at our house. His team was like a family.”
It didn’t take long for Gray to be emotionally invested in the teams that his father coached with all the time he spent with the players and the staff.
“I don’t remember exactly when or where it was, I just remember it was a big game and he lost,” he recalls. “I ran down onto the field after the game and I was heartbroken; I’ll never forget it, I was just crying. I thought it was the end of the world. I went up to him mad and upset, and the first thing he said was, ‘It’ll be okay. The guys played hard. It just didn’t work out today.’”
This was just another of the lessons that Gray learned at an early age from his father. He watched how his dad treated his staff and players through victory and defeat.
“He never treated it like life or death,” Gray said. “It was extremely important to him, but if the team lost he still took pride in the fact that they played hard.”
After a childhood filled with watching other kids get to play for his father, the time came where Donny was able to experience what it was like to be a player under his dad’s tutelage.
“One of the greatest honors I’ve ever had in my life was my senior year in football,” he recalled. “The Amarillo paper did an article on me and my dad. It was titled, Like Father Like son. Dad was a high school quarterback and so was I. And in the article, dad said that me playing for him was the greatest experience of his life. It was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me.”
His senior year as a quarterback at Stratford, Donny was able to share a district championship with his teammates and his father.
“After the game, the first person I looked for was my dad,” said Gray. “I ran up to hug him and all he said was, ‘It was worth it.’ It was worth it, all the fighting, blood, sweat and tears you go through was worth getting to have that kind of enjoyment.”
Gray said that he had always wanted to be a coach, but that playing for his dad only made that passion stronger. He had planned on being a high school coach and working his way up much like his father. However, once Gray left the high school ranks to play in college he found a new niche.
“I got the opportunity to play at Hardin-Simmons [University],” he said. “Somewhere during my collegiate playing career, I fell in love with Saturdays.”
After his career at Hardin-Simmons ended, Gray was given an unusual opportunity to begin his coaching career earlier than most. Before he had even finished his undergraduate work as a student, Tarleton State University’s head coach, Craig Wederquist, offered him a job on the Texans staff to coach special teams at age 22.
“Coach Wederquist was an extremely hard worker and rewarded hard work,” Gray said of his first boss. “He let me run special teams my first year and I took it and ran with it. I was thrown in the fire at a very young age. It was probably one of the best experiences of my life; I learned a lot of football and a lot about recruiting.”
After two seasons with the NCAA Division II institution, Gray left Tarleton and headed to the junior college ranks at Cisco Junior College where he was given the responsibility to coach quarterbacks and receivers. At the time the head coach at Cisco was Jeff Schaum and Gray said that Schaum also gave him a lot of recruiting responsibility.
The following season Gray took a similar position at Trinity Valley Junior College, which was one of the premiere junior colleges in the nation at the time. However, two weeks into the season, Scott Conley, the head coach that hired Gray took a spot at the Naval Academy.
“It was one of those things where I thought that maybe God had put me there for a reason,” said Gray. “When Scott left, Chuck Langston took the head job and moved me to defense for the first time in my career. It was probably one of the best moves I ever made because coaching on the other side of the ball taught me a lot more football.”
In the spring of 2001, Gray would be re-united with two familiar faces and a familiar town. Then McMurry head coach Steve Keenum, who was at Hardin-Simmons as an assistant when Gray was a player, hired Gray to coach defensive backs under his former Cisco J.C. employer, Schaum, who was McMurry’s defensive coordinator.
Thus began a six-year stint as an assistant at the institution he would eventually become the head coach.
“I always thought McMurry was a different type of atmosphere than a lot of places I had seen at this level,” said Gray. “I really gravitated towards it because of the way the school functioned and how personal the campus was. I really felt at home and thought this place had a lot of potential and a lot of opportunity to excel.”
It was a good thing that Gray felt so at home at McMurry because the football side of the school was an uphill battle. In his first two seasons as an assistant, McMurry failed to win a game going 0-19.
In fact, since joining the staff at McMurry he hasn’t experienced a winning season even though the program had success in the late 1990’s. When Joe Crousen became the head coach in 2005, Gray moved back to offense for the first time since his tenure at Cisco, which was a welcome change for him.
Gray recruited and coached Ty Sellers, a NCAA Division II transfer from Panhandle State and McMurry snuck up on its competition and posted a 5-5 record for its first non-losing season since 1999. Sellers passed for over 2,000 yards and nearly rushed for 1,000 in his only season with the team.
However, in 2006, the program was unable to build on the previous year’s improvement and went 3-7. When Crousen stepped aside following the season, Gray was immediately named the interim-head coach.
Sixteen days later, athletic director Bill Libby made Gray official. The decision making process was a no-brainer for Gray, and after much discussion with his wife Tracy, former coaches and friends, he turned to his most familiar, most trusted and most respected mentor: his father.
“He told me I shouldn’t take it if I didn’t believe in it,” said Gray. “I told him without hesitation there was no doubt in my mind that [McMurry] can be as successful as we want it to be.”
Gray wasn’t just going to take any head-coaching job that was offered for his first job. And though his first head-coaching job was exciting in itself, Gray said that it was more exciting that he obtained the head-coaching job at McMurry.
“I invested into McMurry, deeply. Even though the first two years we struggled, I did see a progression in the program. Even in the second season, we didn’t win a game but we were better than the record showed and a lot better team than the year before,” said Gray.
“I had never gone through anything like that before, but every time I thought about leaving McMurry the thing that stuck out most to me was a book I read by Bear Bryant,” he said. “He talked about leaving Kentucky and how it was one of the greatest regrets of his life because he didn’t feel like he had finished the job.
“Once you invest so much into a place, it’s hard to leave it especially when you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished what you set out to do or wanted to do.”
Finishing the job at McMurry University, for the time being is in Gray’s hands. And though the obvious improvement of the program could be in wins and losses, much like his father before him, Gray believes in more than just wins and losses.
“Having a successful program isn’t just on the field,” he said. “But in every aspect, from academics to kids graduating to going out into the world and being successful in life to winning football games. I think that kind of program benefits everybody at McMurry from the past, present and future. It will symbolize what a great university this is, that young men can come here and be a success and have an aspect in life that can turn them into the men that they’re going to be. If one of these days I look back and that’s what we’ve accomplished here, I’ll feel like we’ve been successful.”
Turning a football program around that has been 16-51 since Gray’s arrival on staff in 2001 would be a welcomed change, and Gray said that he thinks that the university has taken the proper steps to help him build a strong program.
“Since Dr. [John] Russell has been here, you started seeing change not just in athletics but on the whole campus,” Gray said of the university’s president who arrived in 2001 as well. “There’s been a change in culture, the way things are done, the facilities and the quality of the whole campus. It’s a place that wants to be successful and cares about its athletes.
“Everything from having a vision of how good the facilities will be in the future, from our publications, our banners, our field, our track, the way the campus looks, the way everybody has started working together from admissions to the faculty is going to allow us to recruit the best student athletes that are out there.
“Once they get here, it gives them a much more positive mentality, which helps them stay knowing that the coaches and faculty are on the same page. Everybody’s goal is the success of the students.”
With all the physical improvements to the campus, and the personnel working together for the greater goal, when it comes to football, Gray said that he would take two things from his father’s teachings that he believes will help McMurry be all that it can be.
“Work hard and care about the kids,” Gray said. “If those two things are at the top of the agenda, everything else tends to work out.”
