By Brice Cherry

Tribune-Herald youth sports editor

A couple of days a week over the course of the summer, Johnny Tusa took his wife, Dollyn, by the hand and hiked the trails of Cameron Park.

Shaded by a canopy of foliage, up and down they’d stroll, over soaring hills and plunging dips, following the twists and bends of the path until it led them home.

It’s a road familiar to Johnny Tusa, for it mirrors his career path. For more than three decades, Waco High School’s head football coach has navigated the peaks and valleys of his professional journey with perseverance.

No active Central Texas head coach has more career wins than Tusa’s 209. Tusa is entering his 22nd season heading the Lions; only LeRoy Coleman, who’s about to start his 26th season coaching at University High, has had a longer tenure.

As he approaches his 60th birthday in January, one might even suggest that he’s gotten better with age, as Tusa directed Waco High to its first state championship game in 58 years in 2006.

Yet for all his views from the summit, Tusa has endured his share of low points, too. From crushing postseason defeats to a grade-changing incident that led to sanctions against himself and his team, the storms of life have occasionally sought their wrath on Tusa.

Honestly, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“You learn who you are in those tough moments,” he said. “You learn perseverance, you learn humility and you learn that you don’t control everything like you think you do.”

Football beginnings

Born in Houston in 1948, Tusa’s family moved two years later to Waco, where his father, Joe, owned and operated a grocery store. When little Johnny wasn’t running through the aisles of the family business, he was usually sprinting across the sandlots and ball fields near his home.

“I was one of those kids who memorized the names of players and was interested in their lives,” Tusa said. “I was interested in mimicking their mannerisms. There was just something that really intrigued me about the sports world.”

Tusa’s first taste of real football glory didn’t arrive until his ninth-grade year at Reicher Catholic High School.

“John Vasek was the head coach at the time, and he gave me a big opportunity when he allowed me to play on the varsity as a freshman,” Tusa said. “He really placed a lot of trust and faith in me, and that was a big moment for a skinny, 130-pound freshman kid.”

With Tusa playing a starring role, Reicher captured the spotlight over the next four years, winning Texas Christian Interscholastic League state championships his freshman and sophomore years and reaching that state title game in his senior season.

Tusa continued chasing the odd bounces of the football throughout his college days at Kilgore Junior College and Tarleton State University, and along the way he was stung by the coaching bug.

Tusa the advertiser

After graduating from Tarleton in 1970, Tusa served the requisite stints coaching junior high and sub-varsity teams in the Waco area before leaving the profession in 1974 to try his hand at advertising.

“I thought making more money might be the answer, so I got out,” Tusa said. “But I quickly found out that I wasn’t happy.”

Tusa rejoined the coaching ranks as an assistant at University High for two years before landing the head coaching job at his alma mater, Reicher.

Just a few weeks into that post, Tusa faced reality: He still had a ways to go to reach the level of Bear Bryant or Vince Lombardi.

“I said to myself, ‘Buddy, you don’t know as much as you think you do,’ ” he said. “. . . I had gotten into coaching as an enthusiastic guy who felt like I could do anything, but I quickly learned that there was more to coaching than running a few plays or a few routes. I wasn’t completely prepared for the entire organization of it all, but it was great on-the-job training.”

After two years and a 7-12 record at Reicher, Tusa accepted the head job for the now-defunct Jefferson-Moore High School Lions, a team that was winless the year before Tusa arrived. Under Tusa, the team went through two more years without a victory. In all, Jefferson-Moore lost 34 games in a row before a turnaround district championship season in 1981.

“I always tell people, ‘I inherited a bad team and I kept it that way,’ ” Tusa said. “But the funny thing about that is, ever since those days, I’ve never taken any kind of winning for granted.”

It was during his tenure at “Jeff Moore” that Tusa met the woman who would eventually become his wife, though he didn’t sweep Dollyn off her feet from the outset. Dollyn, a native of Port Lavaca, was coaching girls track and teaching at University Middle School when Tusa laid on the charm.

“I was coaching my track kids, and he was coaching football, and he kept calling down and sending messages from the press box,” Dollyn said. “Very smooth.”

So was Johnny destined to marry a coach? “I don’t think so,” he said, laughing. “But it’s probably good she had an athletic background. ”

Turning the other cheek

Tusa has encountered criticism from fans over the years. The standard complaint from Waco High fans goes something like this: “With all the talent he’s had, Tusa should have won two or three state championships by now.”

“I’ve heard that, and my response is, ‘What makes you think we didn’t try?’ ” Tusa said. “That kind of criticism has never bothered me. You’ve got to consider the source. I’d like to think people who have never done what you do would be logical enough to realize they don’t know what all is going on.

“The truth of the matter is, quite frankly, if a person pays their money to come to the game and if they’re so fanatical that they want to say something, I don’t find much fault in that. I just don’t listen to it.”

Bob McQueen, Tusa’s longtime rival at Temple High School and winner of two state titles in a spectacular 28-year career, said that no coach avoids Monday-morning quarterbacking, the second-guessing provided by the fans.

“There’s a whole lot of people in Temple, Texas, who thought that 13 years in between state championships was way too long,” McQueen said. “Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the game.”

“People are entitled to their opinions,” said Waco ISD athletic director Johanna Denson. “But they’re entitled to buy a ticket, too.”

While Tusa doesn’t let slings and arrows of criticism avert his focus, it has at times wounded the ones he loves. There were instances early in Tusa’s coaching career in which Dollyn seethed over a loud snipe directed to the coach by a fan, but she has tried to take a cue from her husband and turn a deaf ear.

“The people who go to Waco High games regularly know me, and they usually respect that my husband’s the coach,” said Dollyn, who teaches pre-kindergarten at Viking Hills Elementary. “You still hear comments sometimes. I guess it used to bother me more back when we were first starting out, but I’ve learned to consider the source, as Johnny says.”

“High school was hard sometimes,” said Casey Tusa, Johnny’s youngest daughter, who’s now a junior at Texas A&M University. “One year we didn’t go to the playoffs and people would just say things, mean things. . . .You can’t pin it all on him, anyway. Knowledge can’t run a 4.5 (in the 40-yard dash). There’s only so much you can do with a magic marker.”

One critique Tusa unapologetically shrugs off is the charge that his teams are not creative enough. He has long favored a conservative approach to gridiron game-planning, believing that a tough, hard-nosed defense coupled with a clock-churning rushing attack is the best way to win.

“It’s no secret that I’m conservative in my philosophy. It’s not that we (as a coaching staff) don’t keep up with the new trends, because we do,” Tusa said. “But most of the time, when we’ve been less successful, it’s those times we’ve maybe tried to do too much.”

At no time did Tusa’s white-bread approach provide sweeter results than last fall, when the run-at-will Lions ran off a 13-3 record on their way to state.

“I think Johnny’s a really good coach,” McQueen said. “This past season, what I really liked is that he got back to Tusa Ball, and you see what happened. As a coach, you can’t be somebody else. You’ve got to be you.”

One of the brightest highlights of Tusa’s career came in 1987, his second season at Waco High, when the Lions scored their first post-consolidation win over McQueen’s Temple team. But that season also brought with it one of the most trying periods of the coach’s career.

Enduring scandal

On Nov. 23 of that year, school officials discovered that senior defensive tackle Trell Payne’s failing grade had been changed to a passing one, leading to Waco High forfeiting six wins and its spot in the regional playoffs. Sue Collins, a Waco High sociology teacher at the time, accused Tusa of pressuring her into changing Payne’s grade. Tusa has always steadfastly denied the charge, but the damage was done in the punishment doled out to both his team and himself. He was stripped of his athletic director duties and given a pay cut by then-Superintendent Jim Hensley, with approval of the school board. Collins was subsequently transferred to Waco’s ninth-grade school for her role in the incident.

At the time, Hensley said that Tusa made an error in judgment in visiting with Collins and bringing up the topic of “borrowing points” from an upcoming grading period.

“I have come to the conclusion that this was an isolated incident involving Coach Tusa,” Hensley wrote in a report to the school board. “He was wrong to suggest borrowing points; however, I have no reason to believe that other teachers felt pressure from him to change grades or to borrow points. . . . In fact, many reported that he had been very helpful to them in motivating students to do their work.”

Today, Tusa looks back on that incident with a clear conscience and focuses on the life lessons it provided.

“(Telling the team) was tough. So was accepting my fate and moving on,” Tusa said. “. . . But what you learn from that is to make sure that people in the program don’t carry their roles too far. Where it can be detrimental is when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. You’ve got to watch over your program properly, and ultimately, that’s my responsibility.”

To Tusa, football and other high school sports programs do more to promote education than hinder it.

“Kids are supposed to be there to study and learn, but in many cases, just the opposite occurs,” Tusa said. “A lot of times, what draws them is because they love sports, or they love choir or the band. So hopefully, in our case, we can use football to fortify that solid education, because even if a kid doesn’t reach the professional level of sports — and most kids won’t — at least he’ll have a diploma.”

Tusa and his assistants receive regular grade reports on the Lions’ players, and the coach said it’s rare when a senior football player doesn’t graduate, at least eventually. Tusa could remember “only one or two” players who dropped out of school rather than graduate during his time at Waco High.

On the rebound

The forfeit setback of ’87 didn’t slow Waco High’s progress as one of the state’s powerhouse programs. The Lions returned to the playoffs in 1988 and advanced all the way to the 5A state semifinals in 1991, losing only to eventual state champion Odessa Permian.

Known as one of the more colorful speakers in the Central Texas coaching ranks, Tusa is a wordsmith who loves to turn phrases that catch his listeners off-guard.

“He says certain things, and I think, ‘You know, I have a pretty good vocabulary, but that one’s not in my thesaurus,’ ” Denson said. “He’s not one to use colorful language, but he uses some of those terms, those Tusa-isms, we call them, and you think, ‘Now what does that mean?’ ”

“I still remember one he said when I was in 10th grade,” said Darryl Ervin, who played for Tusa from 1994-96 and now coaches at Lake Air Middle School. “He kept using the word ‘neophyte.’ I thought, ‘What does that mean?’ I’m still not exactly sure what it means.”

Tusa himself is hardly a neophyte, having outlasted a total of seven principals and six superintendents at Waco High. He has no idea how much longer he’ll coach, though he admits “I don’t know what else I’d do.”

He makes his decision whether to return after each season, and three days after his team lost to La Marque last Christmas, he delighted his family on Christmas morning with the news that he’d be back for another run at the state title in 2007.

“I think when it starts becoming a job, that’s when you know it’s time to get out,” he said.

bcherry@wacotrib.com

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