Don’t get it mixed up. Ben Powell did not attend the same high school as Baker Mayfield.
The Pro Bowl quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers attended Lake Travis High School in Austin, Texas.
Powell, 48, attended Travis — another school about 10 miles away, but also in Austin.
Now the head football coach at Country Day, Powell drew inspiration from longtime Travis coach Cleo Halm.
“My senior year was like his retirement year, and he’d been coaching since like the 1950s at that point,” said Powell, who described Halm as “a super-old-school guy. But he had a huge impact on me.”
Country Day, which won four games last season, announced Powell as the head coach last week. He found success at past head coaching stops at Walter L. Cohen and most recently at Haynes Academy, which went 9-0 in the regular season last year.
Here is some of what Powell said about the new job.
Q: It seems like you won at places that don’t always have winning football programs. What kind of impact did that have on you getting this job?
A: When you’re in a smaller school, you’re going to deal with a smaller roster, right? And a lot of times that presents a ton of different challenges. And I’ve had experience in small schools. One of the challenges to Country Day is they’ve been at the top of 1A but then they’ve been right at the bottom of 2A a lot. And that does put you at a disadvantage at the bottom of a division. You could end up playing schools that are twice as big as you in the same divisions and with rosters that are two or three times the size of you in the same division. So, for me, that’s one of the challenges.
Q: How do you confront that challenge?
A: I think you have to be willing to really do a deep dive on your roster and play to your strengths. I think sometimes when guys come from maybe a bigger-school environment they say, ‘Hey, I run ‘X’ system and I’m only going to do this.’ Or, you know, ‘I’m only going to run a certain defense.’ Whereas I think what we did at Haynes and going back to Cohen was every year we said, ‘Hey look, we’ve got some maybe base plays that we were going to run or some base ideas, but we’re going to look at what our talent can do and whatever that may be.’ In the last two jobs we’ve done everything from being super old-school single-wing to five-wide spread and kind of everything in between.
Q: You opened last season against Country Day and won. What were your impressions?
A: They have a strong group of kids coming back as far as at the quarterback position. They’ve got three or four quality wide receivers. We’re going to start from a four-wide environment and probably throw the football. I think probably some people will say, ‘Oh, you know, Ben Powell has been running the single-wing, or he’s been run oriented,’ but we throw the football too. Defensively, just like any small school, you don’t have enough lineman so defensively, we’ll look to be some sort of 3-4 or 3-3 stack.
Q: Any last thoughts on coaching at Haynes? You had a great, undefeated regular season.
A: I had super supportive administration. Great parents. Kids who always showed up to work hard. Tough. We had a great run, and I’m thankful for that opportunity. I’m thankful for my time there. Amazing teachers. Amazing program. You can’t say enough about it. And I just wish everybody in the building the best with their next head coach.