Brian Randle has been blind in his right eye for as long as he can remember.

When he was 3 years old, Randle flipped over the handlebars of his tricycle at the bottom of a staircase at his family’s student housing unit in Stillwater, Oklahoma, smacking his head and shattering his optic nerve.

So, whenever a Richmond Randle football player approaches their head coach with a complaint, Randle runs them through a checklist. How many hands do they have? How many feet? They have two eyes, right?

Well, you’re doing better than me, he tells them. I need you to take your complaining somewhere else.

“We don’t make a lot of excuses in Randle,” he said.

That mindset has become a core tenet of his program as its first ever head coach. Randle had a motto that powered him to start two years at defensive end at Texas A&M-Kingsville despite the disability painted on the weight room wall: ‘The Mind is Everything. What You Believe, You Become.’ 

Randle may only have half his sight. As far as he’s concerned, he still has everything.

“So many times, we get in our own head, and we talk ourselves out of things,” Randle said. “Self-sabotage is a real thing; the fear of success is a real thing.”

Richmond Randle could’ve talked itself out of winning the state championship this past year. The Lions were 21-point underdogs to South Oak Cliff, a program that had reached more consecutive title games (four) than years Randle had been a varsity program (three).

Instead, they envisioned and willed themselves to hoisting the trophy.

That game was the encapsulation of a three-year journey that mirrored the head coach’s own life and honored his father, Dr. Thomas Randle, a superintendent of 26 years and the school’s namesake. It began with a 4-6 season without seniors and leveled up to an 11-2 campaign without a full coaching staff before crescendoing with a perfect 16-0 state championship season.

“It didn’t surprise me they were able to overcome a lot of things,” Dr. Randle said. “That’s what he’s done all his life.”

Dr. Randle’s influence hovers over all aspects of his son’s coaching style.

Brian spent his formative years tagging along with his father’s lawncare business. Thomas had started the venture to supplement his teacher’s salary with four boys in the house, and he kept working the weekends as he rose the ranks of education. Brian watched his father, by then the principal of Knox Junior High, lay grass in one of his teacher's yards.

“Ask somebody in the community about Dr. Randle,” Brian said. “He does so much for so many different people. You don’t do it for credit, for recognition. You do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Brian got his own lawnmower at 9 years old so he could start earning enough money to visit Hurricane Harbor Splashtown. That’s why, all these years later, his war cry is, ‘Earn your sandwich!’ Yes, his players will get the sandwich on the post-game bus ride no matter how the night turns out, but it tastes better when you did all you could on the field. It’s a reminder that every goal is on the other side of hard work.

But that doesn’t mean the results are instant. Playing in 2022 without seniors, there were times Randle was simply overmatched. In the most trying moments of the 4-6 season, Brian would gather the team in a huddle and tell them to look in the stands. It wasn’t just them getting beat; it was their parents who watched on, too.

“Any man that’s worth his soil is not going to lose anything in front of your parents,” Brian said. “You’re going to fight that much harder.”

Over the last three years, Brian displayed just how hard a man will fight when coaching at a school named after his father.  

He left his job at Katy ISD’s Mayde Creek High School, which he calls one of the best run school districts for athletics, to start a program from the ground up while his performance was placed under a microscope by people who believed he was handed the job. To them, it didn’t matter he was the District 23-6A Coach of the Year at Alief Taylor; he’d always be Dr. Randle’s 17-year-old kid no matter how old he got.

“We’ve always had that type of adversity throughout our entire life,” Dr. Randle said. “We knew that there were going to be people who said negative things. But you know what? He did what we’ve always done - proved them wrong.”

Maybe him being Dr. Randle’s kid, armed with all his teachings and the motivation not to let him down, was one of the reasons Randle was able to win state in three years.

The Lions have potential to run it back. Randle returns one of the state's most dangerous players - 2,000-yard rusher Landen Williams-Callis - and state championship game Defensive MVP linebacker Ryan Mallory. The coaching staff will have to replace both offensive coordinators, however, after Brooks Haack took the Houston Memorial job and Stephen Hill left for Fulshear. But Richmond Randle refuses to make excuses.