Lee Fedora Back To Where It All Began At A&M Consolidated

A&M Consolidated High School opened Tigerland Stadium in the Fall of 1989. A wide receiver named Lee Fedora was one of the first Tiger players to enter the field that opening night. A photo of that moment still hangs in the field house.

Fedora helped his Tigers open the season — and the new stadium — with a 20-8 win over Navasota. Little did he know the roads between those two schools would once again converge.

The slender and quick receiver, who also played defensive back, led the Tigers to a 14-0 record before they fell to Tyler Chapel Hill, 14-0, in the 4A state championship.

A vital part of the school’s history, Fedora is now the future for his alma mater. He was named the new head football coach at Consolidated last month.

“It’s nice to be back here, but I just look at it like walking into a school after taking a new job,” Fedora said. “It surprised me when it came open. It’s always been a good program.”

To paraphrase his resume, Fedora played baseball at Texas A&M and led the Aggies to the College World Series in 1993. He took a job as an assistant football coach at A&M Consolidated under his former coach, Ross Rogers.

Fedora got his first coaching job at Rogers High School in 1998. In his five years, he led the Eagles to the state quarterfinals in 2000 and the state semifinals in 2002. He coached two years at Waco Robinson and became the Navasota head coach in 2005.

His Rattler teams went 65-5 from 2011-15. He’s compiled a 167-55-1 career record in 18 years of coaching. The biggest feathers in his cap, other than shaping hundreds of boys into men, were the Navasota state championships in 2012 and 2014. After a 12-1 record in 2015, he abruptly resigned.

The story goes back to last February when a routine agenda item at a Navasota ISD Board of Trustees meeting turned into regional and statewide news. After reconvening from closed session, the Trustees were to vote on extending Fedora’s contract by one year. One Trustee made the motion to extend it, but it died for lack of a second.

News spread quickly, first around Navasota and then around the Brazos Valley. It didn’t take long before it was a major news flash around the state.

After lots of local anger at the school board, and lots of head scratching, the Trustees called a special meeting two weeks later and extended the coach’s contract by a year. But the damage and public humiliation had been done, and Fedora resigned his post on March 9, 2016.

Already a resident of College Station, Fedora said he immediately began receiving offers to coach at other schools. Who wouldn’t want someone that successful, right?

“I had some offers but I didn’t want to take a job just to take a job,” Fedora said. “I wanted it to be the right one. I didn’t just want to go somewhere and leave a year later when a better opportunity came along. I didn’t want to do that to a community.”

So he took a year off and became a fan. He attended football practices and games all around the Brazos Valley, included seven Consolidated games, he said.

“I watched more football on TV than I have in a long time,” he said. “I studied the game more to find out what are some things that can help me in the future. I also got to watch my daughter’s volleyball games, which is something I never got to do while coaching.”

Fedora said he also reexamined his playbook. He took what he learned while studying, evaluated how he ran his drills and tweaked his playbook during the year off.

He said he plans to run the Consolidated athletic program with the same “small-school mentality” that’s worked in his past. Like his previous stops, he wants all athletes to play more than one sport to be more well-rounded.

“I want them to do everything they can do. You only get four years of high school, and when you come back for those 10 and 20-year reunions, you’re talking about the games, the bus rides or something funny that happened in football. You’re not talking about that test you took in math class,” Fedora said.

Fedora said the first couple of weeks on the job that he let the current coaches run drills and practices the same way they’ve been done previously. He’s since brought in former assistants Sean Witherwax, Chad Bruggman and Mike Mullins, and they’ve begun to slowly implement Fedora’s methods and drills.

Witherwax was Fedora’s long-time offensive coordinator at Navasota. After Fedora resigned, Witherwax took the head coaching position at Anderson-Shiro. He recently resigned to rejoin Fedora.

Bruggman got promoted to defensive coordinator last season at Navasota, and he’s already resigned from the Rattlers to join Consolidated.

Mullins was Fedora’s defensive back coach when Fedora was a high school student, and Mullins was also an assistant for Fedora at Navasota.

As for any other hires, Fedora said he’ll have to wait for the school year to end before he brings in the new coaches. He said some coaches remaining from David Raffield’s staff will join their former coach at Cy Ridgeland this fall.

Fedora also said the Tigers will not participate in spring football so they can get the extra week in August camp.

“We have kids in other sports and we won’t have all our coaches in place, so we don’t want to waste those 18 days and then miss out on two-a-days,” Fedora said. “We’ll use our athletic period to let them get use to the drills, the whistle, the commands, fundamentals and terminology.”

The season starts with Copperas Cove and then a road game at 2016 state semifinalist Richmond Foster. The Tigers have tough district games against 2016 state runner-up Temple, state semifinalist and cross-town rival College Station and a Ross Rogers-coached Bryan High School.

The Tigers themselves advanced to the third round in 2016. And now as the Lee Fedora era begins, and District 18-5A just got a little bit tougher.

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