90% of Texas Ejections Come From One Group of Schools.
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Updated: July 20, 2026
90% of Texas Ejections Come From Schools That Said "No Thanks"
Here is the stat that stopped the room yesterday: nine out of ten player, coach, and fan ejections in Texas last year came from schools that chose not to join The Texas Way. The program is completely free. They passed anyway.
I sat in on the THSCA panel Saturday, July 19th, at the THSCA Coaching School and Convention in Houston, and the panel did not sugarcoat where we started. Joe Martin explained this whole thing kicked off in 2024 because behavior across UIL sports had gotten bad. Rising incidents. Rising ejections. Somebody decided talking about it was not enough.
Now they are heading into year three, and the numbers are turning.
What the Texas Way actually is
Joe Martin moderated the panel consisting of Rey Zepeda (UIL Director of Athletics), Stephen Mackey (2Words Character Development), Kristyn Shelton (Prosper ISD), Jason Haddock (Wharton ISD), Mike Bass (Alvin ISD)
Steven Mackey, who leads the initiative, was clear that this is not a program to babysit hotheads. He called it a culture change effort built on three ideas: respect for others, control of self, and a spirit of competition. The pitch to kids is simple. You give respect because of who you are, not because of what the other guy does. You control yourself no matter what the scoreboard or the crowd is doing. You compete with everything you have, but you never trade your character to win.
Officials are buying in too. More than half of Texas officials through TASO have gone through a course to be certified as a Texas Way official. Mackey said the thing he hears most from them is that they finally have hope again, that they do not dread showing up to games the way they used to.
The results
Ray Zepeda added some data, and it is worth reporting loudly.
Texas logged its lowest number of negative incident reports in over seven years. You would have to go back to the COVID-shortened season to find numbers that low. That is a 27% improvement over the recent highs. Football alone saw a 25% drop in ejections of all types. Coach ejections are down double digits over the two years of the program. Girls' basketball made a real jump.
Here is the split that tells the whole story. Schools that ran the Texas Way from year one to year two cut ejections by 28%. Schools that did not participate saw ejections go up 35%. Of the roughly 3,900 ejections statewide last year, about 3,500 came from schools not in the program.
Sixty-three percent of Texas schools have enrolled. The other 37% are generating almost all the problems.
Three schools doing it right
The panel featured three Districts of Distinction, the handful that went beyond signing up and actually changed their communities.
Kristen Shelton from Prosper ISD talked about coaches filming their bench protocols so the district could see they were practicing it, not just running it once. Their middle schoolers made sportsmanship PSAs and posted them to their own socials.
Mike Bass from Alvin ISD leaned into respect through service. His student-athletes, seventh through twelfth grade, put in nearly 16,000 community service hours last year. He told a story about kids spending four hours cleaning out an elderly resident's apartment so she would not get evicted. Next year's goal is 19,000 hours.
Jason Haddock came into Wharton ISD as a new AD and made the Texas Way his first priority. His smaller 3A school logged over 960 service hours in year one, from game-day car rider lines to food banks. His line stuck with me: few of our kids go pro as athletes, all of them go pro as adults.
What comes next
The program stays voluntary for now. But Zepeda made it plain that if the data keeps holding, mandating it is on the table.
And he made one request of every reporter in the room. Cover the good news with the same energy we give the bad. There is a lot going right in Texas public schools, and this is a big piece of it.
I am glad to do exactly that. For over 20 years, we at Lone Star Gridiron and the Lone Star Podcast Network have only reported the positive. Other entities in the hunt for "likes" and clicks report on every salacious story, but we have been from the start cheerleaders for community based athletics and all the benefits they bring. For that reason, we have not and will not shy away from sharing the good stories.
Chris Doelle
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