A needed change of scenery brought coach Jeremy Wooten to Dulce.
A year ago, when he was the head football coach at Shiprock, his wife, Chastity Wooten, unexpectedly died just prior to the season.
“It was a trying year,” he said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to keep coaching. She was the ultimate coach’s wife. Friday nights, we couldn’t go to bed until we talked all about the game.”
It left him in a tough, conflicted position.
“What do I do? I didn’t want to leave Shiprock, it being the last school we were at together,” he said. “But there were just so many memories. I needed to heal. So, I applied at a couple of different places.”
And when the couple would go on vacation into Southern Colorado, they would invariably drive through Dulce.
“Every time we passed through here, she would say, ‘I want to live here one day,’” Jeremy Wooten, who took on the dual role of Hawks athletic director and football coach in late July, said. “So in a way, my being here is honoring her wishes. She wanted to live here and from heaven, she kicked me in the butt and told me if you’re going to coach, get to it. That reignited that passion for coaching.”
Jeremy Wooten is inheriting a team that is coming off a playoff appearance, but lost nearly all of its players to graduation.
So while he was able to scramble and recruit from the hallways well enough to pull together about 25 players, most of those are either new to the sport or have not played in a while.
Jeremy Wooten got his coaching start in Southeast Texas at a small, six-man school, so taking on the challenges of eight-man football is not too different, he said.
“We have a lot of green guys who are hungry,” he said. “But the best thing is they’re willing to learn. Probably half of my guys are freshmen. As a coach, that can be frustrating during the game, but as a team, I look long-term. It’s great for the future of the program, having that many freshmen and sophomores to build on over the next two to three years.”
The team is so shy of experience that there is just one senior, Maliek Green (6’3”, 260 lbs., who, at the moment, has not been slotted into a position, although he saw a bit of time on defense last season, recovering two fumbles. With his size, however, Jeremy Wooten can see Green being a ball carrier and simply rolling over people.
“He’s one of our leader-type of guys and he’s taking some of these younger guys under his wings,” the coach said.
Freshman running back, defensiveback Payton Milne (5’3”, 150 lbs.) saw some time as an eighth grader last season and will likely be one of the leading ball carriers.
And sophomore linebacker Kash Trospher (5’8”, 140 lbs.) got into four games on the defensive side of the ball, while sophomore offensive and defensive lineman Emmett Chavez (5’9”, 200 lbs.) will be a mainstay on both lines.
“They didn’t have the summer to get used to me and to get to know what I’m about so the first week I put in my expectations,” Jeremy Wooten said. “You’ve got a week of me being nice. Now it’s time to grind. Time to get down to work.”