More accolades are coming for the Bowie Jackrabbit boy’s basketball team as the coach is getting some love from other coaches.
The Texas Association of Basketball Coaches (TABC) named Doug Boxell the 3A coach of the year.
Boxell has been at Bowie since 2013, coming off a five year stint at University of the Ozarks. The process for this year’s state title team has been in the works since he arrived.
This team of players were in junior high then, the ideal age.
“He began that first year listing on the schedule the regional tournament and the state tournament,” associate head coach Jonathan Horton said. “It was not something that had been done here before but every little detail similar to that one is really what began changing the mindset of our players and parents and the community.”
Those types of small changes did not pay off right away, but it slowly started to change the expectations of what the players hoped to achieve. Getting a group of players to believe they are capable of winning a state title if they put the work in, in a place that has not had that type of success in awhile is half the battle.
Those high expectations started in the coach’s office among the staff, determining what was acceptable and how they would work.
“The whole staff in the past at the end of every season would have their own ideas about what went right, what went wrong and what needs to be improved,” Horton said. “Oddly enough, we are still doing it, even though we won the last one.”
The staff would then go find what they needed from that list in the offseason.
Early on, a change in defense was necessary. Boxell used some of his background from his time as a college coach at University of the Ozarks to find a defensive philosophy borrowed from another college that would work for his team.
It was from this that they borrowed some of their defensive principles they have used since. It was a big reason they won the state title. In the title game, they held Mount Vernon to only 28 points.
It is these types of commitments in the offseason from the coaching staff that allowed them to put their players in the right spots to succeed.
Boxell has now won six state championships at four different schools, a feat that may not be equaled by any coach in the state. Still, he does not look at that or the coach of the year award as an accomplishment for himself.
“It reflects our team won a state championship,” Boxell said of the award. “Whenever your team’s very successful, everyone is going to receive a lot of benefits because of that. It represents what the team did. It’s more of reflection of the team’s success than me.”