Midway football coach Kent Bachtel looked over an auditorium full of students, teachers, parents and members of the media and sort of stated the obvious Wednesday afternoon.

“Isn’t it a great day to be a Midway Panther?” Bachtel said to yet another round of applause at the end of the school’s signing day ceremony.

Midway lined up seven college signees on its auditorium stage for the ceremony — one each in track and soccer, two softball players and three football players.

Indeed, it was a great day to be a Midway Panther, just as it was a great day to be a Waco High Lion and a University Trojan and a China Spring Cougar and a La Vega Pirate and, well, many other things across the Central Texas high school landscape.

After all, national signing day — when high school athletes make their college choices official — is about as tangible of an example of hard work paying dividends as there is.

It also ties together quite a cross-section of interested parties. Of course, the athletes are happy, and the parents and the school communities take pride in the signings. The college coaches are happy, because recruiting is probably the most grueling part of coaching college football. And then the fans of the colleges are almost universally pleased with recruiting classes.

In short, everyone sees the upside, which is great.

As such, signing day becomes larger than any individual student-athlete signing with any particular school.

And that’s certainly the case at Midway, where the Panthers are sending three football players to three big-time football programs. Trey Graham is headed to Texas, Ty Horn chose TCU and John Hubert signed with Kansas State.

While Midway has sent players to Division I-A college football before — probably about the average number for a Class 4A school in the last 20 years — this signing day definitely signaled a sharp uptick in the number and quality of prospects the Panthers produced.

Before Wednesday, the last truly elite prospect to come out of Midway was linebacker David Maxwell, the 4A Defensive Player of the Year in 1992, who went to Texas A&M, where he played some defensive line for a couple of seasons.

Maxwell drew attention from many football powerhouses around the country and ultimately chose Texas A&M over Oklahoma and Texas.

But even then, the amount of attention Maxwell received doesn’t compare to the spotlight that’s currently on the Midway football program.

“We didn’t have as many (coaching) stars as are coming now,” Bachtel said. “They’re coming left and right. We’ve had Bob Stoops, and had a big day with Mack Brown.”

Bachtel said Brown caused quite a stir at the school when he came in for a visit recently. The Texas coach signed autographs and took pictures with teachers as he stayed for over an hour even though he couldn’t actually talk with football players.

Of course, Brown was there to see, if not talk to, Graham. But he was also there, more than anything, to be Mack Brown.

That sort of states where Midway is at least at the moment. It’s a place where college coaches want to have a presence.

And the pressing reason that people like Brown and Stoops need to have a presence at Midway is because they would like to be on the short list of 6-foot-1, 190-pound junior safety Ahmad Dixon’s college choices.

Dixon received a scholarship offer from Texas Tech before last season and, since then, his stock has risen to the point that he’s regarded as one of the elite prospects in the class of 2010.

On Tuesday, Dixon made a mid-day trip to Bachtel’s office to chat on the phone with Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp.

Dixon said he spends an hour or more on the phone with college coaches every day. Fortunately, he also said he’s the type of person who enjoys meeting a lot of new people and he’s using all this attention to do just that.

“It’s weird,” Dixon said. “I wanted this to happen, but I never thought it would happen this way. I pictured a select few coming through. I never imagined almost every college in the nation.”

This is not unusual. This is how the college football recruiting process works — like it or not. It’s just unusual, or perhaps just new, at Midway

Wednesday at Waco High, Johnny Tusa presided over a signing day ceremony for the 23rd straight year and has seen 107 of his players sign with college football programs.

Tusa said it doesn’t become routine and he doesn’t take any of it for granted. But he has seen just about everything and met everybody that’s anybody in college football.

“Nick Saban has been in my home,” Tusa said. “Terry Donahue, Bob Stoops, Les Miles, Mack Brown. Mike Leach was here last week. Tom Osbourne has been here. I’d have to sit down and make a list. Probably someday I should.”

On Wednesday, as he does every signing day, Tusa pointed out to one of his players where to sign on the dotted line. This year it was defensive lineman Andrew Weaver, who signed with Texas A&M.

Tusa knows that winning in big-school competition on the high school level is directly tied to the amount of talent in the program, which directly ties it to college football recruiting.

“We’ve obviously been blessed to have the kinds of kids that can play at the next level, and that’s the only way you can compete in this league,” Tusa said. “If you’ll search the day, the ones that were the most successful had the most people that have the ability to play at the next level.

“That’s not a secret formula. That’s the only formula you can have for success.”

That certainly proved true in reflecting on signing day and the 2008 season — Waco High was very good and Midway was even better.

So the question is this — is it a brief phenomenon or the future here in Central Texas?

I’m not going to try to answer the question. I posed a similar question to Graham, and he said he couldn’t answer it either.

But Graham said he fully enjoyed Midway’s run to the 4A Division I Region II final this season and he likes what it has done for the Panthers.

A Super Centex All-Academic first-teamer, Graham sees how this year’s signing class could fuel Midway’s performance on the field in coming seasons.

“It’s so much motivation for the younger kids to see those coaches coming through here,” Graham said. “It’s just going to make them work harder.”

cconine@wacotrib.com

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