Shaun Tarantola wasn’t a big reader until he found the book that spoke to him for the first time.

A high school freshman in Washington in the early 1990s, he rifled through “Friday Night Lights,” the story of Odessa Permian’s quest for a state championship in the 1988 season, picturing a world where football was religion, and the townspeople were its congregation. That was the first time he prayed for a piece of Texas high school football.

Tarantola began coaching in the north in 1999. But every now and then, Boobie Miles, Permian’s star running back, or ‘MOJO,’ the program moniker, would pop into his mind. He got his house appraised in 2014 and realized the value had skyrocketed while his paychecks barely made ends meet.

“Do you want to go work in Texas?” his wife asked. “This is the time to do it.”

He overshot the West Texas town he first read about and landed nine hours south in the Rio Grande Valley. In January 2022, Tarantola earned his first head coach opportunity at Brownsville Lopez High School. He’d achieved his dream of coaching Texas high school football but soon realized the state was so vast it held different versions of the dream.

Lopez has a 99.6% Hispanic population, one exit off the highway away from the bridge into Matamoros, and is surrounded by houses where the backyard fence is the country’s border wall. Most male students live and breathe fútbol instead of football. The soccer team, which has reached the state tournament five times and has one state championship, is the most popular show in town. 

Tarantola inherited an 0-10 football program decimated by COVID-19. The first season’s senior class had 10 players, only four of whom even played football the year before. The junior class had more numbers, 12 total, but COVID canceled their freshman season, and Lopez couldn’t field a JV team when they were sophomores.

Tarantola was forced to call 15 sophomores up to play 5A varsity football, and Lopez went 1-9. They lost 85-14, and 71-0, twice. Tarantola knew Lopez would be competitive once the sophomore class became seniors. A grown man has more perspective and foresight, however, than high school students who enter a game week after week hoping to win and switch the goal to surviving after the first quarter.

“I knew we had a bright future, but we had to keep those guys together,” Tarantola said.

As a head coach in Washington for nine years, he ended every huddle after a game by having the players give shoutouts to other players for their accomplishments. The recognition from teammates had more impact than from coaches. Tarantola was working overtime to establish a positive culture.

 “(In) 2022, we were doing shoutouts every day after practice,” Tarantola said.

Lopez went 2-18 in the first two years. Some of the sophomore class quit. But Tarantola never did. No matter the score on Friday night, he was there Monday morning, ready to work. Senior running back Eddie Slovak, a starter since his sophomore year, says Tarantola’s consistency kept the team intact even when some players decided the losses were too great to bear.

“I never really had a coach that would stay there for us,” Slovak said.

Tarantola had suffered three losing seasons in the 20-plus years he’d coached before arriving at Lopez. Heading into the 2024 season, he sensed this year’s team had shades of a competitor. Lopez was reclassified from 5A Division I to 5A Division II. But it also had a core of 20 seniors with two full seasons of experience. 

Lopez had a three-headed monster with Slovak returning as the district’s leading rusher, wide receiver Gabe Rios (951 yards and five touchdowns) and 2,000-yard passer Lupe Ramirez. Both lines of scrimmage were full of seniors who’d matured physically after two years playing against older players.

But most importantly, Lopez sees nothing on a given Friday night that is tougher than the two seasons they endured to get here.

“Now that we’re all seniors and juniors, it makes us tougher and mentally stronger,” Slovak said.

Lopez is 5-1 this season, matching its win total from the 2019-23 seasons combined, when it went 5-40. 

Tarantola came to Texas searching for “Friday Night Lights.” While his version in those first two seasons didn’t have the deep playoff runs and pageantry he first fell in love with, it’s built young men who’ll take the perseverance they learned at Lopez into the rest of their lives.

And that’s a story worth telling.

“Knowing that (even if you’re) starting from the bottom, there’s always a way to the top,” Slovak said.