Jacob Johnson is a mountain of a man with a personality somehow larger than his physical presence. With his black sleeves cut off, the Millsap head coach looks like a college strength coach - and behaves like it, too. 

The final boss of Millsap’s August afternoon practice is a three-man blocking sled, which the already-exhausted players push up, down, and around the grass field, switching out when the coaches’ whistle blows. Every third whistle, Johnson taps a kid out, gets in a three-point stance, and drives it about twice as far in the same amount of time it took the players.

Sometimes, he says, the best way to lead is by getting in there and doing it. And who’s to argue with his results?

Johnson became Millsap’s head coach in 2015 and found a town without a lot of success but a whole lot of pride. The football team’s only playoff win was on Nov. 12, 1999. Yet Johnson remembers a time in the Naples International Airport in Florida when a man approached him because he wore a Millsap shirt, ecstatic he’d found a fellow Millsap Bulldog.

Johnson led Millsap to the playoffs in 2018, then a winning record in 2020, the first in 12 seasons. In 2021, the program earned its second-ever playoff win. Last season, the 21 seniors made up the largest senior class of football players in school history, and that group couldn’t even field a 7th-grade team when Johnson first signed on. His energy is contagious.

After the final whistle ends the blocking sled drill, the players huddle around Johnson, the sun glistening off his bald head like the swarm of white helmets around him. Then, the most successful Millsap coach this century starts talking about … losing.

“I might lose, but I got the balls to go do it,” Johnson yells.

Johnson has spent the last year and a half fighting a battle he could’ve lost - Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia - which has forced him to reflect on the difference between winning and losing. He’s realized success isn’t exclusive to winning - success is the courage displayed through adversity. It’s driving that sled backward, even though the chemo pill you took that morning is zapping your energy. It’s having the balls to do it.

“When I was in the cancer center, waiting to hear how long I was going to live, you see people fighting in there for every day,” Johnson said in a sit-down interview with Erin Hartigan. “I couldn’t have told you the score to any game. But I could tell you how we handled ourselves.”

One of those men he met on the journey was Wichita Falls City View head coach Heath Aldrich. The two did not know each other when they faced off in last season’s bi-district playoff game. But when Johnson found out Aldrich had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January 2024, he drove to his hospital room at UT Southwestern to pray, talk and laugh with him. They’ve talked and texted every week since.

This week’s game between Millsap and City View has all the stakes that make Friday nights in Texas special. Millsap (3-5) likely needs to win out to make the playoffs, while City View (6-2) needs to win out for the District 6-3A DII championship. 

But before kickoff, Aldrich and Johnson will pray together on the 50-yard-line, knowing no matter the outcome, they’ve already won.

“The world wants us to hate each other,” Johnson said. “And out of that, we’ve become brothers.”

–

Heath Aldrich bleeds City View blue. 

That’s why he was in the gym that January night, the rare head football coach and athletic director doubling as the girls’ basketball coach. Girls basketball was the second coaching title he took on when he was hired as the offensive coordinator in 2019, but the eighth-grade class from his first season were now seniors, and he wanted to finish out with them.

In the middle of their district basketball game, one of those girls looked at Aldrich and told him he looked yellow. Like, Big Bird Yellow.

He’d been having symptoms he didn’t know were symptoms for about a month, feeling full all the time, even if he only ate a little. Aldrich went to the emergency room for testing the following day and found out two days later he had locally maximized pancreatic cancer at 39 years old. 

A month later, after he’d been admitted to UT Southwestern for treatment, Aldrich got two texts from Jacob Johnson, head coach of the Millsap Bulldogs, the team Aldrich’s City View program played in the bi-district playoff round the previous season. 

The first text was a video of Johnson praying for Aldrich from his office. The second text was that he was on his way. Johnson, a year into his own fight with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia, was there to laugh, pray, and give Aldrich some advice. Don’t Google anything, for starters. But most importantly…

“He told me to divulge myself to the Lord,” Aldrich said. “That was probably as good of advice as I could get.”

Aldrich and Johnson didn’t know each other well until this moment. They’d prayed together on the 50-yard line before the playoff game, then went their separate ways until this diagnosis had bonded them for life. 

Johnson had found out about his cancer at a girls’ basketball game himself, watching his daughter, Payton, play Comanche when his doctor called. Johnson had gotten routine blood work done on a previous week’s visit, and the results came back at critical levels. 

A healthy individual’s white blood cell count is within 6,000-7,000. Those cells increase to fight infection, elevating to around 9,000 with a fever. Johnson’s white blood cell count was 120,000.

Have you felt fatigued recently, the doctor asked.

I’m a coach, Johnson responded, I’m always fatigued.

The chronic leukemia diagnosis was like giving in to fatigue and waking up in a bad dream. Leukemia is a blood cancer. There is no tumor to remove; it’s part of you. And the chronic designation meant that while Johnson could treat it with a chemo pill, he would have it for life.

When Johnson told his players about the diagnosis, he made it clear he didn’t get leukemia; leukemia got him and God. After the athletic period, a senior approached Johnson.

“Coach, leukemia didn’t get you,” the kid said. “It got all of us.”

Johnson and Aldrich have continued to coach throughout their battle. This fall was Johnson’s first and only season with his two kids, Payton, a senior athletic trainer, and freshman son, Braun, sharing every practice with him. Aldrich finished out that girls’ basketball season and has led City View football to a 6-2 record. 

These two men are the ultimate servant leaders, coaching through cancer. But they both emphasize that the kids who will line up across from each other this Friday night have done more for their coaches than the coaches did for them.

“It’s part of what keeps you going - just normalcy,” Aldrich said. “That’s what you want, something that’s part of your routine that you can focus on.”

Johnson has responded well to his chemo pill; his white blood cell count has returned to normal, and his traceable leukemia is going down. Aldrich, meanwhile, just switched off chemotherapy and says he has more energy. Technically they’re winning, but they’d already beaten cancer by how they lived long before they had more points than it on the proverbial scoreboard. 

When Johnson was building the Millsap program through those tough early years, he repeated a saying to his team - ‘The hotter the fire, the stronger the steel.’ Aldrich and Johnson lived together through the hottest fire. Nearly a year has passed since they first met before that playoff game as opposing coaches. This week, they’ll do so as brothers, with a bond like steel.

“Jacob Johnson has been an inspiration,” Aldrich said. “The kind of friend that you want to be to somebody.”