Gary Joseph climbs an outdoor staircase to his office overlooking the practice field. Welcome to Katy Football’s version of Pride Rock. Everything the light touches - the state-of-the-art weight room, fieldhouse and nine state championship banners - is his kingdom.

There’s a sound behind the door. A bark, maybe? Joseph ignores it momentarily while reminiscing about his father – and laundry.

His old man never talked about himself. (Arf!) Gary only learned about his father Eddie Joseph’s athletic career after finding his mom’s newspaper clippings from his service in the Marines while playing on the Camp Pendleton football team. Everything Gary learned from his dad came by observing him coach at Wharton High School growing up. (Yip!) Lesson One: There’s no room for ego with five coaches on staff.

“If something needed to be done, you did it. You didn’t complain,” Joseph says. “It was your job to be a coach. It was your job to be a custodian. It was your job to sit there and wash clothes.”

Friends and family describe Eddie and Gary as clones. Gary has 14 assistants but washes towels between the midday athletic period and 5:00 p.m. practice. Last year, the 68-year-old drove the team bus to the preseason scrimmage. His career head coaching record is 255–26, with eight state championship appearances. He reached the height of his profession long ago and still can’t find a job that is too small to do. (Woof!)

With that, Gary opens the office door and unleashes the beast. A Yorkie scurries out to greet him, and he scoops it up while grabbing a seat. He’s dog-sitting today for his mother, Mary. She’s 91 now, and Milo is her companion. Eddie Joseph passed away five years ago. Gary refers to him as the single biggest influence in his life.

They were one of the profession’s most respected father-son duos, Gary as a Katy coach and Eddie in his second act as the Executive Vice President of the Texas High School Coaches Association from 1992-2003.

Twenty years later, the Josephs are still high school football’s preeminent name - now Gary is the patriarch. His son, Jeff, is entering his third year as the Port Neches-Groves head coach. In 2023, the program won its first state championship since 1975. Gary and Jeff are the first active state champion father-son head coaching duo.

And yet, when asked to grace this year’s Dave Campbell’s Texas Football cover to commemorate that historic accomplishment, everything in their DNA screamed, “Say no!” Eddie’s other golden rule: Coaching is about the kids – not you.

“I really don’t want to do this,” Gary said. “There’s a lot more people a lot more deserving than myself.”

Football’s first family has always kept the game first.

“I don’t know a bigger family in the state of Texas that has done the things that they’ve done,” THSCA Executive Director Joe Martin said.

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The coach who’s inspired and intimidated generations of high school football players sits crossed-legged with Milo on his lap, scratching the Yorkie’s head until he dozes off. Maybe his family’s ribbing is right, and the notoriously intense Gary Joseph has mellowed out.

“I’ll tell you the one that’s different is Grandpa Gary,” Jeff says. “He’s gotten a little soft in his age with my nieces that have been around him a little more.”

His granddaughters call him Bear, and his wife, Sheila, is Honey. But Gary’s family called him Bear before the granddaughters arrived – so long, in fact, that the nickname’s origin is unknown to them. Some say it's a reference to legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant. Others presume it’s because he’s so stern.

Eddie gave Gary that name. His oldest son was small, so he had to be fierce like a Bear.

Doug Fertsch, who married the Josephs’ first daughter, Tricia, witnessed Bear’s coaching origin story. Gary blew the whistle between practice periods during Wharton’s two-a-day workouts in eighth grade. The varsity team was lying under a tree during a rare practice break when Fertsch, a senior center, called Gary over.

“Bear, give us just one more minute before you blow the horn,” Fertsch pleaded.

Gary stared at Fertsch, and the older player wondered if he’d convinced the coach’s son for mercy. Then Bear walked over to Eddie and blew the whistle as loudly as possible. Practice back on.

“I can’t hear high-pitch noises because of all the whistles that I blew when I was young,” Gary said.

Scott, the baby of the five Joseph children, was a high school junior when Eddie transitioned from coaching to the THSCA. The family moved to Austin Westlake, where Gary was the defensive coordinator. At one of his first practices, Scott accidentally called his brother “Gary” instead of “Coach.” Gary made him roll across the field as punishment.

Football-wise, Gary is the same Bear who took Katy’s defensive coordinator job in 1982. The running joke is that players from 40 years ago can still call the plays. Older alumni say he doesn’t yell as much anymore. But the program has reached the point where he doesn’t have to. The fieldhouse has blown-up pictures of Katy’s nine state championship teams. Players know the expectation.

There was no weight room when Joseph joined then-head coach Mike Johnston’s inaugural staff in 1982; just a couple of weight racks in the hallway. Don Clayton, Katy Cinco Ranch’s long-time head coach, was an offensive assistant for Johnston in the ‘80s. He could turn around on game day and instantly spot his wife and daughters in the stands. That’s how few fans were there.

“We were 1–9 and proud of it because we should’ve been 0–10,” Clayton said.

Gary stayed through four seasons during which the Tigers won eight games. Then, in 1986, Katy went 10–0. Johnston, with Gary’s help, had turned the program around. By then, Gary’s three kids had all their friends. They couldn’t leave. 

Katy’s last losing season was in 1990.

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When Jeff Joseph sees pictures of himself coaching Port Neches-Groves, he’s shocked at how similar he looks to Gary. His father and grandfather always shared the ‘look’ when he’d earned a scolding – shoulders rolled back, head tilted forward, the entire face turned to slits. Jeff is not a clone like Gary and Eddie. Bear and Honey’s middle child always had more Honey in his personality, not because of the orange hair.

Gary’s only two hobbies are coaching and parenting. Growing up, Jeff and his friends would go to the rice fields before school to hunt ducks and geese. He’s traveled to over 30 countries in the past 15 years.

Gary wanted to be a football coach since high school. Jeff chose the business major at Texas A&M because, like most college freshmen, he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Family members say everyone thought Jeff would start a business one day.

But Jeff was at a crossroads his junior year, stuck in two accounting courses and a statistics class he loathed. On Thanksgiving Day, he happened upon Gary and Uncle Scott watching film in the living room. After 90 minutes of breaking down tape with them, he decided to take up the family business instead of starting his own.

He’d been a captain on Katy’s 16–0 state championship team in 2000, a strong safety in his father’s famed 3-4 “Weak Eagle” defense. Jeff was the team’s Gary translator. When Gary talked X’s and O’s, his mind moved so fast that his words came out in spurts. When he finished, players would turn to Jeff. What’d he say?

When Jeff approached his mom with plans to switch his degree, Sheila’s eyes welled in tears. They weren’t happy ones. She’d lived the life of sacrifice her son was signing up for.

Gary estimates he made $9,000 annually at his first coaching gig. Sheila clarifies it was $7,500. The family had built a financial cushion when Jeff was in college and Gary was 20 years into his defensive coordinator role. But the memories of supporting three children with Gary as an assistant coach and her as an elementary school registrar were fresh.

Jeff, his older brother, Jon, and his younger sister, Julie, spent all their free time at the Katy athletic facilities. The football players were Jeff’s role models. In fourth grade, he watched the boys shave each other's heads and hopped in the barber chair. They set the razor low and gave him a buzz.

“I told them yes because I just wanted to be like them at that point,” Jeff said. “It was a little tighter than what I expected.”

He was Katy’s ball boy. After an away game in Alief, Sheila told him to ride the team bus with Gary. But Gary came home alone that night thinking Jeff left Alief with Sheila. They drove to the fieldhouse in a panic. Sheila was on a landline with the police while Gary paced around. She told them her son was missing, that he had on black tennis shoes. Then Gary noticed black tennis shoes poking out from under his desk. Jeff had grabbed a pillow and slept there for four hours. He wiped his eyes awake and wondered why his mom was a bawling heap on the floor.

His parents worried about the finances, but Jeff’s childhood was rich with relationships. 

“My kids always say, ‘Mom, we were happy,’” Sheila said. “So not having a lot of money doesn’t mean you can’t be happy. We grew up happy.”

Jeff graduated from Texas A&M with a business degree but instantly started working on his teacher’s certification. The kid everyone believed would get rich in the corporate world now chased a different kind of wealth.

Almost 15 years after his call to coaching, Jeff Joseph was out of football.

Family members have different guesses for why Jeff stepped away for two years to be the vice president of a commercial waste management company. Burnout, probably. Texas A&M hired him as a defensive quality control assistant after he emerged as Westlake’s defensive coordinator. The college game is a grind. Or maybe the money signs went off in his head.

The truth is, he was jaded.

College coaching was never his goal. He thought the opportunity would help him master something other than his family’s 3-4 scheme. But after three years at Texas A&M, he believed he had a future in Division I football. Then the next job fell through, a couple of interviews didn’t pan out and he ended up at Magnolia West without the fire he had as a college junior in his living room.

“I went back to a high school job not mentally in the space where I was appreciative of what I had,” Jeff said. “I probably had a little too much of an ego about myself. I thought I should’ve been this or should’ve been that. I wasn’t in it for the right reasons.”

He knew it wasn’t fair to the kids, so he walked. But Jeff spent every day in a commercial wash plant for trucks and tanks, surrounded by grit, sand and mud, wishing he could return to football. He missed experiencing those highs and lows of a Friday night with a team.

Jeff fell back on advice he always heard his dad give: A better title doesn’t make it a better job. His father spent 22 seasons as a defensive coordinator under the legendary Mike Johnston. So he took a defensive assistant job at Southlake Carroll, back to coaching for the same reason he first started: he loved watching kids overachieve, not his title.

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Gary Joseph is not an emotional man, yet here he and Sheila were, decked in Port Neches-Groves purple with tears in their eyes watching Jeff hoist the state championship trophy – happy tears, this time.

When Gary made his first state championship in 1994, Eddie told him to enjoy it, because he might not get there again. Gary has been to 13 since, but hasn’t lost an ounce of respect for how difficult it is.

There’s an old joke among the Katy coaching staff that there is no joy in Tiger Land. A Katy assistant would have the ‘Top 22’ player sheet for next season drafted in his inbox before State and fire the email on the bus ride home with the trophy resting next to him. Matt McDaniel, Port Neches-Groves’ defensive coordinator who coached at Katy for years, remembers Christmas Eve in 2012 at his grandparent’s house when he talked to Gary for an hour on the phone about who their outside linebacker would be next season.

Losses haunt the Josephs. They always wonder what they could’ve done differently.

There’s a lock box on the corner of Gary’s desk. It’s filled with letters from alumni. Every time he needs a reminder of why he coaches, he cracks it open and flips through written testimony of the lessons his players took with them into the real world.   

Coaches get judged on their record, but it doesn’t define them.

“The worst thing in the world you can say is, ‘The only thing he’s interested in is wins and losses,’” Gary says. “No, the only thing he's interested in is helping you learn to win the right way.”

This creed was passed from Eddie to Gary to teach winning the right way. It now lives on through Jeff.

“All those small lessons that make a difference in what type of person you’re going to be in your life, that’s the education  you get out of playing sports in high school,” Jeff said.

The Josephs are the teachers, and class is in session.