During the history of football in Coleman High School. the players and coaches are not all that have been changed.  Four different locaions have been used for football grounds in Coleman.

In the beginning the old rodeo grounds were used for a field.  This was located on the Baird road just across the road south of the present Municipal Park.  There was a grandstand and a broad fence around the field.

The Fair Grounds were the next location for the team and fans to assemble.  There were bleachers here and the football game was played inside the race track.  A nice board fence surrounded the field.  It was located just west of the Municipal Park.

After playing all around the Municipal Park, the latter was finally turned into a football field.  The games were played on a rough, sandy hill with plenty of stickers.  Fans stood on the side lines throughout the game and wsallowed the dust and saw half the game.  A wire fence enclosed the field, and it was a simple matter to slip in.

Hufford Field was our next move.  Now south of town on the old City Lake road, we have one of the finest football fields in West Texas, according to all who have seen it.  There is a nice sod field for the players to play on without being choked with the dust and scratched with the grass burrs.  There is a high fence around the field and blinds at both ends and bleachers for the spectators, band and pep squad.  It is one of the few lighted fields in the West.

The United States of the mid-1930s was a difficult era to live in.  The Depression had put a strangle-hold on the nation. Millions were in poverty and/or out of work.  To try to jumpstart the economy, then President Franklin Roosevelt enacted several relief programs.  It was an alphabet soup of organizations: The Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration (NYA).   All were slightly different in purpose, but their main goal was the same — to get the unemployed working again.  Where there weren’t jobs to be done, the government created projects to better the community. Theaters were built in Chicago, libraries went up in New York City.  In West Texas, they built football fields.  Oh sure, that’s not all that was done in this area, but long after many of the WPA-built bridges and the CWA-built school houses of that era have been demolished, many of those stadiums are still standing and in use.  There’s a football/rodeo arena surrounded by an 8-foot wall in Coleman.  Most of the hands that built them nearly 70 years ago are long gone, but their work lives on.

Driving by Coleman’s Hufford Field, things look remarkably the same as they did more than 60 years ago.  At least from the outside.  Surrounding Hufford Field’s four-block area is one of the most imposing structures of any West Texas field.  It’s a thick eight-foot stone wall, that has turned dark gray from six decades in the elements.  It could probably pass for a prison wall with a little strategically placed barbed wire.  “I just always remember that wall being there,” said 83-year-old Bob Russ, who was the football coach for Coleman in the mid-40s.  But actually, the wall was almost new when Russ got to Coleman in the summer 1940.

The field and the surrounding wall was completed earlier that year by the National Youth Administration, another Roosevelt relief program.  Unlike the WPA and CWA, which targeted adults, the NYA employed people aged 16-25 that had either dropped out of school or were unable to find jobs after high school or college graduation.  High schoolers got $6 a month, $15 for college students and $25 for graduate students.  Initially, the complex was built for both football and rodeo.  Russ put a stop to that as soon as possible.  “I worked hard to get the rodeo association to build their own place,” said Russ who was a longtime coach and administrator for Lake View High school after he left Coleman.  There’d be holes in the field, had a fullback that turned his ankle real bad.”   But just like the kids that originally built the field, Russ and his players took care of it.  “In ’47 we broke the field and regrassed it,” Russ said. “Went in there with turnplows.”

That same year. Russ’ Coleman squad went undefeated and won the region crown, which was a far as schools that size went back then.  And Hufford Field was always packed, even the top of the wall was used as seating.  “We’d turn the lights on and the crowds would come,” Russ said. “We’d fill that place up.  “It was probably the best field in this part of the state.”  There was only one thing wrong with it.  That tall NYA wall started leaning almost as soon as it was rected.  “We were always trying to keep that wall from falling down,” Russ said. “It was just too tall and heavy.”  The battle continues today.  At various points around the wall, steel braces have been positioned to keep some 60 years of history standing.    (San Angelo Standard Times, San Angelo, Texas, 2002, by Jeff Wick.)