Reginald Samples is flipping through his iPhone, scrolling scrolling scrolling, looking for the photo you’ve got to see. It’s on here somewhere, hidden in plain sight among the photos of his seven grandchildren, his four kids, his wife Julie and his players.

Don’t worry, he’s not distracted. He’s still talking.

“I realized that what makes you good at anything is the stages you go through,” the 68-year-old Samples said from behind his office desk, sunlight peeking in from the window overlooking Duncanville’s Panther Stadium. “And if you want to be good, you study. You accept the fact that you need to do better.”

It’s a mantra that’s helped Samples through his 33 years as a Texas high school football head coach, winning 326 games along the way — 8th all-time among UIL coaches, and tops among Black coaches. It’s what kept him going through years of oft-unfathomable heartbreak before finally capturing his first championship in December. It’s a mindset he’s passed along to his seemingly countless assistants that have embarked on head coaching careers themselves, creating one of the state’s most robust coaching trees. And along those stages, he’s accumulated a not-insubstantial number of critics and detractors, insistent that he’s more a product of malfeasance than merit and making him one of the sport’s most polarizing figures.

Mid-sentence, he stops scrolling.

“After all these years, I learned it, and I learned it, and I figured it out,” Samples said, turning the screen. “So I went and invested in a real, live barbecue grill.”

There she is: a beautiful smoker, probably some eight feet long, the kind that’d make pitmasters nod in approval.

“I bet I’ve messed up a thousand dollars worth of brisket,” Samples said, “because it’s the hardest piece of meat to cook.”

Sometimes it’s the ruined meals that make the best ones more satisfying.

Samples’ story begins just north of here, in sunny south Dallas. Growing up without a father, he turned to his coaches for guidance. First, from a man named Robert Giles at W.W. Bushman Elementary School, whose tattered picture still sits on a table in his office.

“He was the first guy to take me under his wing,” Samples recalls.

That includes the time when a 10-year-old Samples declined to run in the 400-meter relay for Giles’ track team, resulting in a visit from his mother and a lengthy timeout in the small ballroom during PE class. It’s an experience that sticks with him some 58 years later.

“It was profound,” Samples said. “It made me figure things out. Like, who am I to say no to this guy who has done everything for me? He just let me know that as talented as you are, you can be insignificant. There are some guys that still remind me of being locked in the ballroom.”

Then, from the legendary Norman Jett, his football coach at South Oak Cliff with whom he was inducted into the Dallas ISD Hall of Fame last year. As he made his way into the coaching profession, it was Charles Malone, who guided him during his early years as a do-it-all assistant at Dallas Madison.

But if Reginald Samples’ story was a movie, the inciting incident might be, of all things, a freshman basketball game in January 1989. Coaching the Madison Trojans — down to six players after mid-term grades clobbered the roster — Samples’ squad battled tooth-and-nail against the mighty Lincoln Tigers for the district championship, but entered the fourth quarter with just three players due to foul trouble.

“There’s this guy standing up over the top of the stadium, screaming at the Lincoln coach on how to beat us with three players,” Samples remembered. “Double the point guard, trap them, press them, all that. He’s driving me crazy.”

When Samples’ Trojans improbably pulled off the shorthanded upset, he made sure to turn to the boisterous gentlemen and, um, invite him to have a seat, beating his chest along the way. Flash-forward eleven months, and Samples — Madison’s offensive coordinator on the football side — received a mysterious invitation to put on some dress clothes and report to Lincoln High School.

“I walk in the conference room, and on the other end of the table is the guy that I told to sit his ass down,” Samples said. “And I thought, ‘Oh Lord, I’m going to get fired’.”

It was Napoleon Lewis, the principal at Lincoln, and he brought Samples in not to call him on the carpet, but to interview him for the job as head football coach.

“The spirit and enthusiasm that you exhibited on the basketball court was memorable for me,” Samples paraphrased, “and that I’m the kind of leader that he wanted to head up the football program here at Lincoln High School.”

Thus began the legendary head coaching career of Reginald Samples, thanks to telling the right person to “hush”. The build at Lincoln was a slow but steady — a winning season in his second season in 1991; a playoff berth in 1995, the program’s first in nearly a decade; and a breakthrough in 1996 featuring the program’s best season in history (12-1-1) and a stunning run to the regional final.

What soon followed could only be described as Lincoln’s golden era, with Samples overseeing five consecutive seasons of 10-plus wins starting in 2000, and a once-unthinkable berth in the 2004 4A Division II state championship.