Statesman Q&A: New UIL AD Ray Zepeda on high school sports' present, future

Ray Zepeda has dealt with the University Interscholastic League for most of his life as an athlete, coach and administrator. Now he’s one of the people in charge of it.

Zepeda, 53, who grew up in Corpus Christi and most recently served as the athletic director for the Cypress-Fairbanks school district, just outside of Houston, is the UIL’s new director of athletics, taking over in June after former AD Susan Elza joined coach Matt Rhule’s football staff at Nebraska.

As the new school year is set to begin, Zepeda recently sat down with the American-Statesman for a discussion on a wide variety of topics, including the immediate issues facing the state's governing body for high school athletics:

Where did you go to college?

Texas A&M. So I feel kind of, like, very weird getting my paychecks from the University of Texas now as an Aggie. Someone asked me, “What did you do when you saw that?” I said, “Oh, shoot, I cashed it. What do you mean?”

What was your first job out of college?

I went back to my hometown, and I was a middle school coach and coordinator at Hamlin Middle School there in Corpus Christi. And that was quite an experience, to be 23 years old and leading a staff of coaches that were considerably older than I was. But it was a great experience.

I joked all the time with our middle school coaches when I was an athletic administrator that I probably wasn't tough enough to stay in middle school coaching. I only did it one year. That's a tough gig. I moved up to the high school the next year and coached in Corpus for two years before moving to Houston.

On to bigger, better things: the UIL

What attracted you to heading up the UIL?

Well, I think my 30 years of experience in various capacities really kind of just informed that the UIL was very consequential for coaches, athletes and communities. I think it's the preeminent organization of its type here in the United States.

And so as such, I really felt that the varied background that I had could possibly be something that would be beneficial here, and that I could impact a lot of people in this role.

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What are the UIL's most pressing issues going forward?

I would point to three things.

I think in the most immediate, right now, is just the heat and the health and safety issues as we're getting cranked up. I mean, we're experiencing kind of record-breaking heat throughout the state of Texas, and trying to work with our schools to ensure that they've got appropriate plans in place to address that.

We don't necessarily dictate those plans, but hopefully we can influence them, make sure that they're supervising kids in an appropriate fashion and that they're prepared to respond when necessary. I think that's the most immediate concern right now.

Then you look at kind of what's going on in the collegiate athletics scene. I think that you always have kind of a trickle-down effect of issues and things that happen, and it's interesting to me that no one really seems happy with the state of collegiate athletics right now. But yet everybody wants to take what's going on in collegiate athletics and kind of push it down to the interscholastic row.

And so with that, there's been a focus on individual rights and versus maybe collective responsibilities. I think that's a hard piece to kind of navigate. I think that we'll continue to have conversations regarding everything that you've seen at the collegiate level, from NIL to transfer portal issues, and that that'll be something that we are going to need to contend with.

And finally, I think what you've seen here in Texas, a population shift away from rural areas to kind of this I-35 corridor triangle between San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. And that puts a lot of tremendous pressure on us in the realignment process and trying to account for competitive equity, while also kind of giving realistic travel demands on our schools.

And so as we approach the realignment process here this spring, I think that's going to be something that we're going to have to contend with now and in the future.

Issues looming for the UIL

Expand on the population shift and its impact on the nitty-gritty of realignment.

Anytime that you have a concentration of population and you're trying to maintain competitive equity, trying to maintain that competitive equity for those outliers. In those areas of the state, they're a little harder to get to that increase of travel, while trying to maintain that competitive equity can be difficult.

So I think that that's going to be a focus of ours of what that might look like in the future whether we can accommodate that competitive equity in our current model. Or if there's other ways of doing that.

Then you mentioned the trickle-down effect from what’s going on at the college level?

I'm just talking about things you've heard a lot of discussion about, like in NIL opportunities for student-athletes, transfer ability, to transfer and move. You know, “I'm not happy here. I want to move there.”

I think all of those are things that we get asked a lot about recently. And again, I do think there's a little bit of irony with that because I think most people would say that right now, collegiate athletics is a little bit of a mess. But we're being asked to possibly consider some of these changes that have made things very chaotic in the collegiate space.

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The Big 12 commissioner recently said they want to play more Friday night games. What are your thoughts?

I think that the Friday night experience here in Texas is a special one. I think it should be reserved for interscholastic athletics. It’s very difficult for me to kind of speculate on what the Big 12 should do, but I would hope, given that they have so many members here in the state of Texas, that they would honor Friday night as something that’s set aside for high school athletics.

Goals, goals, goals

What are your top goals for your first year?

First of all, when we stated this publicly that we're really trying to increase and improve our communication, our collaboration and our consistency here, I think you always have to kind of start with yourself. And I think that while the UIL has done a great job in all three of those areas, there's always room for improvement.

And if we can communicate more effectively, and we can collaborate with our schools and coaching associations, and we can be more consistent in those approaches across time, I think that we're going to improve our level of service to the stakeholders that depend on us. So I think internally that's my level of focus externally.

We're really trying to press sportsmanship this year across the state. You know, you really cannot have positive outcomes and a negative environment. And that's a very difficult task to take on because it's complex. There's no one thing that has led to an erosion of sportsmanship at our competitive venues, but I think it's something that we're going to focus on and really lean on our coaches.

I think that positive engaged coaches are powerful and have powerful influence. And so I think that we can kind of get halfway there if our coaches will buy in to improving their performance of sportsmanship with their kids, their parents, and have a strategy for doing so.

Then we're also going to work with our officials’ associations to really see what type of support they need, so that we can help improve the competitive atmosphere that surrounds high school athletics here in Texas.

How do you institute such a broad thing like sportsmanship?

That’s very, very difficult, right?

I think the first thing that you need to do is you need to point out that it's a problem. We've talked very specifically starting at the Texas High School Coaches Association state convention and the Texas Girls Coaching Association state convention and kind of got in front of our coaches and showed them the numbers of what objections have looked like, not just in student-athletes, but also fans.

And we've seen a marked increase in that over the past five years, and so when I think sometimes you see the big picture. it allows you to then have a little bit of a sense of urgency about this problem.

So we've tried to do that from our level of influence, again, using the communication processes that we have. I think that also we've had extensive conversations with our state officials associations about what they're experiencing and how can we work collaboratively with them to improve what they experienced and empower them to kind of take control of those competitive contests.

And the other thing is, we really lean on our game administrators, and there's typically a game administrator that's in charge of the environment that surrounds the competition.

We're really looking at the resources that we provide for them over the course of this year, maybe revamp some of that so that we can empower administrators that are serving in that role to be more effective. Because that's a very difficult job when you have people that are so emotional about our contest and about athletics in general here in the state.

Are there possible new sports to be added?

What's on a new sports discussion list?

I don't know if I have a list of like, “Hey, we're going to go to this and then go to that.”

We just rolled out water polo last year, and I think that that was very instructive for us.

While the talk about new sports can sometimes be fun and enjoyable, the actual implementation of a new sport is quite difficult. We had quite a few less schools participate than was anticipated in water polo when we got started, and I think a lot of that speaks to the difficulty of adding a sport, especially in difficult economic times. And a lot of our schools are facing those difficult economic times.

So I don't know if we have a next sport up. We want to maximize participation in the sports that we have.

But I think it's always important to continue to have positive dialogue about what might be next that kids would be interested and communities might be interested in so that you're kind of working ahead of that curve. But I don't know if we have a kind of “next up” mentality as far as sports. I think we want to get better at what we're doing.

What's the process of adding a new sport? How does that work?

As with anything else, it would start at our Legislative Council. Every year if you go to any of our Legislative Council meetings that we have in June and October, you're going to see a lot of advocates for the addition of sports kind of show up to propose that this or that sport should be added.

And our 32 superintendents that make up that Legislative Council, they consider those requests, kind of lean into us for feedback about what participation looks like. And then we kind of go from there.

I think that you need to have a critical mass of students that are participating across the state, though, before you take on, “Hey, we're going to put this under the UIL umbrella as we move forward.” And right now, I don't know that we see that there's a sport that has that critical mass and participation. But that doesn't mean that might not change over the next few years.

My home state (Kansas) added bowling recently, so I thought that was interesting.

Well, there's a lot of club bowlers right now. and you mentioned fishing. There's a lot of different things that kids do and their structures for allowing that, that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be something that's sanctioned from the UIL. I think that we're here to sanction things that involve large-scale participation.

How was the first year of water polo?

I'm going to speak as an athletic administrator. For the athletic director and staff here.

It was a big deal for us. I think our community responded very well. We have 12 schools that field in boys and girls teams, and I think that we participated in over 30 playoff experiences, and that was all new for those kids. So my perspective is it was very positive.

I think that right now in my new role I need to continue to work with school districts that have run into some challenges for implementation and see how we can support them so that we can grow that sport.

Growing up with sports, then and now

Thoughts on sport specialization versus playing multiple sports in high school?

I think going back to my own high school experience, it would not have been as satisfying if I would have specialized. I played football and baseball in high school — not very well, either of them — but I did play, and I enjoyed the dichotomy of a fall and spring sport.

Which sport were you better at?

That's a great question. I think that my passion exceeded my talent in both sports, and that passion has obviously led to a long career in athletics. The great thing about sports and why I got into coaching, though, is that while I was not a very talented athlete, my coaches really believed in me, and they got me to believe in myself.

And I think that that allowed me to play at a higher level than my talent should have allowed me to play. And in so, I hope that we're doing that for kids. But with that being said, I think I was a much better football player than I was baseball player.

What was the best Corpus Christi Flour Bluff team you played on?

I played on a really good baseball team my sophomore year in high school, and that was way back in 1986. It's almost funny to say that.

We were the No. 1-ranked team in our classification most of the year, and it was a very special team with a lot of kids that went on to play college baseball at the next level. I certainly didn't have that type of talent, but it was a fun team to be a part of.

And when you are out front for a majority of the season, while it didn't necessarily end in a state championship for us — we got upset, I think, in the second or third round — it was awesome to see those types of players play and to feel like you're a part of something that was special.

What’s been your favorite job so far?

I've had several, and I think that's one thing that led me to believe that I would be a good fit here. I've worked in rural school districts; I've worked as a head coach in a variety of inner-city situations, and it would be difficult to impossible for me to point to one job or position as my favorite.

I think the totality of what I've been able to experience over 30 years is what I've derived value from, in I think I've always been a person that is kind of where you know you live where your feet are planted. And you try to do the best job that you can, and I've enjoyed every single stop that I've had over my 30-year career. I've certainly enjoyed being here the last couple of months.

What things had you figured out by your last year as a head coach that you had no clue about in your first?

I think that thing that you learn as a head coach, when you start being a head coach, you put an inordinate amount of focus on wins and losses at the expense sometimes of the process, and trying to really enjoy the process of having a group of kids and growing them.

When I was first coaching, I think I spent way too much time focusing on the living and dying with each of those games. And sometimes we weren't very talented. We had a couple of years where we weren't supertalented, and it was tough. And I don't know that I was the best person to be around all the time.

But I think as I gained perspective toward the end of my coaching career, I started to really lean into enjoying the growth process with those kids. I think that was the No. 1 lesson that I learned as a head coach, and I got much better about that as I progressed through my head coaching career.

When you go from coach to athletic administrator, what changes?

A lot.

No. 1, you miss the kids on a daily basis. But beyond that, while your individual professional responsibilities change, you're not out there at practice every day. I think that I always tried to take my mindset as a coach into being an athletic administrator. So while my professional responsibilities changed, I tried to make sure that my approach didn't change in the things that were important to me.

And furthermore, I would say that's been something that's been important and will continue to be important to me here and the UIL, that one of the strengths of having me being here — and we've been able to add Grace McDowell, who was the athletic director for Frisco ISD — is that we've been a consumer of UIL services like a direct consumer over the last few years. So having that perspective, I think, gives us an informed perspective of how we can better serve moving forward in the future.

I know it's one of my goals here to never lose that connection back to the schools because you're so insulated away from the daily process of coaching kids and running events.

If you had a coaching or administrative do-over, what would it be?

When you've worked 30 years, there's a lot of situations that you could probably point to. I don't know that there's any one in one season that you say, “Hey, if I would have just run this play vs. that play,” that it would have made that much of a difference in a 30-year scale.

But I think that all coaches over time, you take a lot of pride in the kids that you coach that really bought into what you were doing and then left you and accomplish great things.

I think the thing that sticks with you, though, are the kids that you just couldn't reach, that didn't buy in and that you couldn't motivate them to really be all in with what you were doing. And then you see the resultant effect of that over time. I think those are the things that I regret.

If I had any do-overs, I could probably mentally go through some kids that I felt like that I wasn't able to reach, and I would like to try to go back and try to reestablish that relationship. Because coaches and administrators typically have the next season; kids have a short window with which to participate. And if you can't motivate them to do what they need to do to get the most out of that experience, it's something that's lost for him.

That's probably the only thing that I would regret or would want to do over, at some of those individual relationships with kids that we just couldn't get them to kind of buy in to what we were selling at the time.

At the same time, you can't really reach everybody.

I know, but I think that that needs to be your intent. And I think that you need to be self-critical, though, when you weren't able to reach them, to figure out what you could have done better. I think that that's what you do when you're a coach. If you don't do that, I think you're giving away some of your power that you have to truly impact results with kids.

What's the best piece of advice you've gotten so far from UIL Executive Director (and former UIL athletic director) Charles Breithaupt?

He's given me a long list of advice. It's probably like the Christmas list that Santa Claus has of the naughty and nice list that hits the floor and keeps rolling.

But I think that the biggest thing that I would say is he's remarked several times that he feels that I'm very passionate about what I do, and I am. I think that passion comes from a great experience as a high school athlete, enjoyment as a coach and the daily process of being coached. Ten years I’ve been athletic administrator at a very large school district, and I think he's encouraged me to lean into that passion and be authentic to that.

If I can do that, then I'm going to really be of the most service to the kids, coaches and communities that we serve.

Where are you going to be on Friday nights this fall?

We're rolling up on Friday nights, you know, and that's the most exciting thing, I think, looking forward to this position. I've left Cy-Fair ISD, where we hosted 50-65 varsity football games during the regular season. And so, when you're working Thursday through Saturday night through the entirety of a regular season, that doesn't leave a lot of time for going to see how everyone else is doing it.

So I hope that you're going to find me at a stadium or in a gymnasium and looking at the totality of what's out there and how people experience a Friday night here in Texas in a competitive interscholastic environment. I'm looking forward to that.

What's the biggest difference between living in Houston and Austin?

Well, it's a lot less humidity here. The nightly walk is a lot different.

People talk about the traffic here, but the traffic is bad in Houston as well.

You know, I think that every place here in Texas, I think the best part, is that it's all a little bit different. After living in Houston for over 20 years, I'm certainly enjoying living in Austin and kind of experiencing all that this area has to offer.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: New UIL director of athletics Ray Zepeda ready to have major impact