The actions have to match the words.
So as Hurricane Berly bores down on Texas earlier this summer, Jason Bachtel, first-year Houston Christian head coach, second year in the program, confers with his wife, Tara.
Football is their mission field, and has been across 23 years of marriage. It’s how they approach every situation, including this first-ever opportunity for Bachtel to be an FCS head coach, and it’s how they’re approaching this tropical storm.
More than 2 million Houstonians lose power July 8 as the storm rolls up from the Gulf of Mexico and onto land.
Four of those without power are Houston Christian players who live on the 100-acre campus southwest of downtown.
The Bachtels’ next action illustrates their approach.
“I don’t know if this will get me in trouble with the NCAA, but we had four kids who had no electricity on our campus who came and stayed with us during the hurricane,” Bachtel tells FootballScoop. “We want to have a servant’s mindset, a servant’s heart of making sure that a leader is a servant. Sometimes we lose sight of that as coaches.
“Tara’s a part of the mission every single day. She’ll come to two or three practices a week, is on every road trip; in my 23-year career I think she might’ve missed one ballgame ever. That’s kind of how we set it up so that our kids know it’s a family. And when they have activities, we will be there as husband and wife, mother and father. It’s the approach we take on with our coaches as well.”
Before Bachtel fashions an on-field imprint on the Huskies, he wants this approach being borne out daily by the HCU staff. He doesn’t pretend it’s a novel approach, nor does he cut himself the grace he so effortlessly shows others.
“I believe it was Bruce Arians who told guys when he was in the NFL at Tampa Bay and Arizona, if they miss one of their kids’ activities, he’d fire them,” says Bachtel, a Texas native whose brother, Kevin, is head coach at Howard Payne. “I have that same approach. Go see your own kids because we don’t get it back. I was probably a terrible father for my first three kids but I will not do that for my 6-year-old daughter.
“We work a lot of hours, but family has got to be part of that because if we talk about it, we need to live it out.”
In Bachtel, there’s a belief the Huskies only now are beginning to live out a greater horizon. After serving as offensive coordinator a year ago in helping then-head coach Braxton Harris guide the program to a promising six-win camp featuring four Southland Conference triumphs.
The season rests as the impetus in Harris returning to Campbell, now as the head coach, and for Bachtel’s bold proclamation.
“I really do believe that this could be a national powerhouse because of the location we’re in and the kind of guys we want to recruit to build a football program,” says Bachtel, also praising the beginnings of the foundation from Harris’s year at the helm. “I had staff pretty much picked out so that within 96 hours of being named head coach, I had nine guys signed to a contract here at Houston Christian.”
There’s significant continuity on the offense, a specialty for the former quarterback Bachtel, and overt optimism surrounding the defense of Zach Wilkerson, architect of top-10 defenses across a decade in charge of the stop-units at NCAA Division III staple Hardin-Simmons University.
“The No. 1 thing that I had to do was find a defensive coordinator, because I’m still going to call the offense,” says Bachtel, a 14-game winner in his final two seasons guiding Howard Payne. “I can’t give that up right now, so my thought was immediately to go to find a defensive coordinator, and a lot of people probably thought my brother would come aboard because he was with me at Howard Payne. But we weren’t sure if that was right at the time, so I immediately went after a guy I respected in Zach Wilkerson, a guy I didn’t know, but respected how he coached defense and schemed me in the past.
“And I told him, ‘Zach, I’m not going to make another defensive call until you tell me what you’re looking for as an assistant.”
Wilkerson is fine-tuning a multiple-front defense for the Huskies and plans to primarily deploy two-high coverages in the back-end.
Bachtel’s offense features the engineering to sweep up and down the field in, well, hurricane fashion.
“Offensively, we want to be a power-spread, power running team and vertical passing,” Bachtel says. “We want to try to snap it 85, 90 times a game.
“We want to play as fast as we possibly can, get after it and create a fun style of football with tough-minded and physical players on both sides of the ball.”
Which brings the focus to Houston Christian’s roster construction – for 2024 and beyond. Bachtel and many of his staff members know first-hand the breadth and depth of Texas prep football superiority.
“I think where we are a little different is that we want to recruit Texas high school football, probably even more so than what did last year,” Bachtel says. “I’m a proud member of the THSCA (Texas High School Coaches Association), we’re here in the fourth-largest city in the country, the fifth-most diverse city in the country.
“We’re trying to bring guys back to Houston that were maybe sold a dream somewhere else but now want to come home and play in front of friends and family.”
They’ll start this new process with 14 returning starters for the immediate future and 24 newcomers who arrive as part of 247Sports’ nation’s-best 2024 FCS recruiting haul.
With a belief in now and all that can be.
“We first had to teach kids how to believe that they could win,” Bachtel says. “We knew we had talent, but now we believe we can win and know how to win.
“We’re ready to rock and roll and get after it.”