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.

Anyone familiar with Samples’ history recognizes this as the moment where the story changes, morphing into something closer to a wake than a celebration. Because while Reginald Samples is on the business end of arguably the biggest gut-punch in Texas high school football history, you will, remarkably, need to be more specific.

It was in 2004, in overtime at Baylor’s Floyd Casey Stadium against Kilgore, that Lincoln lined up for a go-ahead field goal in overtime…only for the Bulldogs’ Nick Sanders to block the kick and return it 68 yards for a state title.

Nearly 20 years later, a deep sigh escapes Samples.

“Honestly, I feel like I got what I deserved,” he said. “I feel like it was not my time to win the game. I feel like I did everything I could do. I was proud of the work that we had done.”

His one regret, he says, was playing it safe — kicking the field goal instead of going for it on 4th down, as recommended by his assistant Jason Todd. But he knows there’s not a right answer, and that revisionist history serves nobody.

A year later, Samples left for Dallas Skyline, tasked with building the same powerhouse at Dallas ISD’s largest school as he’d done at Lincoln. And it worked: a 110-22 record, four regional final berths and a state semifinal berth in 2014, before running into the Kyler Murray machine.

Which brings us here, to this office overlooking Panther Stadium in Duncanville, where Samples has called home since 2015. And while this place has brought him his greatest success — 91 wins against 18 losses, four state championship berths — it’s also brought him his greatest heartaches.

You almost certainly know about 2018. Trailing 36-35 on the final snap, Galena Park North Shore’s AJ Carter miraculously pulls down a state championship-winning 45-yard Hail Mary from Dematrius Davis to capture the state championship, become a viral sensation, and once again deny Samples.

“I look at it, like I did in 2004, that there’s a God and things happen for a reason,” Samples says five years later. “I wish I could figure out how it would’ve been if it didn’t happen. You’ve got to live with it.”

Maybe you forgot about 2019. The Panthers looked like a runaway freight train until the minutes before halftime of the state semifinal against Rockwall. That’s when superstar quarterback Ja’Quinden Jackson suffered a season-ending knee injury up 35-0, forcing freshman Chris Parson into action. Duncanville fought, but was out-slugged by North Shore in the title game once again.

“That one was the hardest one,” Samples said. “I kept questioning myself, because I was trying to find something that I did wrong. Should we have taken [Jackson] out? It really makes you try to figure out why. You know, what’s the plan?”

Two years later, it was Duncanville vs. North Shore Vol. III, and for the first time, Samples’ Panthers were widely thought of as heavy favorites, taking on a wounded North Shore team with its own freshman quarterback. That’s what made the Panthers’ 17-10 loss — their third at the hands of the Mustangs in the span of four years — all the more shocking.

“They were difficult,” said Julie Samples, Reginald’s wife of nearly 39 years. “I guess you saw the picture where he was comforting [their son] Ra’Shaad in 2018 after the Hail Mary. He also comforted me, because I was equally upset about it. It’s hard watching him lose games like that.”

It doesn’t hit you until you walk into Samples’ office and pass the trophy case. Three runner-up trophies, one next to the other. The last one even more acutely painful considering his protégé Jason Todd — the one who told him to go for it in 2004 — led South Oak Cliff to an historic title just hours before. Enough to drive a grown man crazy…or even a little envious.

“I did think like that, but only for a minute,” Samples admitted. “Because if you know coach Todd’s background like I do, you understand why he deserves it.”

And so the stage was set for the fourth installment of Duncanville vs. North Shore for the 6A Division I state championship in 2022, with North Shore looking to make it four straight against its unlikely nemesis. As usual, tension was high. As usual, it was a physical affair. As usual, it came down to the smallest of margins.

But a strange thing happened on the way to Reginald Samples’ fifth gut-wrenching state championship loss: he won.

“It took me a long time, even after the game was over, I raised my hands up, but I was still thinking… is this game really over?” Samples said. “Is something fixing to happen? It just took me a minute after I sat down, I thought, wow, I guess it’s really over.”

On the other sideline, North Shore coach Jon Kay couldn’t help but feel good for his counterpart.

“Directly after the game, I was happy for him,” said Kay, who took a job on the Rice staff in the offseason. “The thing I appreciate about him is, he didn’t want us to give it to him. We took our best shot, and they beat us. The way the game ended, to me, it was consistent with the theme of that rivalry. It was fitting.”

In the stands, Lancaster coach Leon Paul — a former Duncanville assistant under Samples — couldn’t hold back his emotions.

“I had tears in my eyes,” Paul said. “For all the disappointment, to see the joy on his face, it was inspiring. It was emotional for me because I know how badly he wanted that trophy. He didn’t need it, but it just makes it all the sweeter.”

Julie, though, felt differently. After a year of loss — her father and her brother in particular — the victory was bittersweet.

“It felt like I thought it would, but it kind of put things in perspective for me,” Julie said. “To recognize that he’s still successful, and it’s not just measured by winning and losing. It’s measured by the impact he has on the young men.”

The celebration for Samples’ long-awaited title, however, was not universal. He’s been regularly accused of recruiting, the cardinal sin of Texas high school football, at all three of his coaching stops. Critics point to the number of transfers of blue-chip players into his programs and the staggering consistency of talent within them.

For the record: Samples has never faced discipline from his district executive committee for recruiting, let alone the UIL. He was suspended for a game and Duncanville was put on a year-long probation in 2020 for using a volunteer coach — something Samples claimed was a mistake — but that’s the extent of his record.

“People tend to use other people as reasons for their inability to do things,” Samples said of the criticism he receives. “They discredit other people as a means to make an excuse for themselves. It bothers me, but it doesn’t bother me. If I recruit and I’m doing so well, somebody would love to hang my butt for recruitment. And nobody’s ever put it on a piece of paper. So why should I worry?”

Samples isn’t on social media, but his wife does keep up with it.

“I have thick skin,” Julie Samples said. “I couldn’t say that in the very beginning, at Madison and Lincoln and Skyline. Everybody’s going to have an opinion. It’s how you react, or you don’t react, to critics.”

Back in his office, Samples pulls out a yellow legal pad and flips about halfway through its pages, all filled with notes. A couple of weeks ago at a conference, Samples jotted down the names of his assistants that have become head coaches. There are 22 names on the list.

“I thought I was a good coach,” said Paul, who’s gone 19-5 in two seasons at Lancaster. “I thought I held myself to expectations, until I worked for him. The expectations he put on me made me realize that I wasn’t coaching to my capability. The way he pushes his coaches, the way he gets his coaches to push his kids, it’s how he’s won so many games and made so many coaches.”

Samples has the most robust Texas high school football coaching tree this side of Gordon Wood, earning the nickname “The Godfather” of Black coaches. Paul said that Samples’ organization — the way he conducts practices and meetings — is what sets him apart, and is what he took from his time under Samples’ tutelage. The other thing he took: the concept of accountability, which came up after a particularly lackluster workout.

“Coach Samples was dealing with back pain, and he gets in front of the whole team and tells them how bad a practice we had,” Paul said. “But he said, ‘It’s not y’all’s fault, it’s my fault — I allowed you to have a bad practice.’ So he drives to the sideline, gets off his cart and bear-crawls 50 yards. I couldn’t believe it.”

Soon, Paul and a number of assistants were bear-crawling themselves, following the lead of their head coach. It’s a brutal bit of honesty and self-reflection, something Samples said is key to his winning ways.

“My coaches would say that I keep it real,” Samples said. “Another guy once said I was ferocious. Well, sometimes, when you’re having to be honest with people, you have to be ferocious.”

For outsiders, too, Samples’ coaching ability is eye-catching.

“I had someone tell me, ‘You have to have great players to win, but not everyone can win with great players’,” Kay said. “It’s Texas, everyone has talent. He’s had his share of talent, but at the end of the day, you don’t know the challenges he’s faced Monday through Thursday for the product he puts out on Friday. I was in a similar situation at North Shore that he’s in at Duncanville and has been through his whole career. The success speaks for itself, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Samples will turn 69 in November, during his 34th year as a head coach. His Panthers are the No. 1 team in Class 6A, the favorite to go back-to-back in the state’s largest classification. He says he only contemplated retiring briefly before coming to Duncanville and has no plans to hang it up anytime soon.

There are few mountains left to climb — with a big year, he could move into seventh place on the all-time UIL coaching wins list — but he’s cognizant of his legacy.

“I’m most proud of the fulfillment I’ve given to all of my supporters who have been heartfelt, disappointed, and with me all those years when things didn’t work out,” Samples said. “I’m most proud of being able to give them the joy of celebrating what they wanted for me all along.”