Among the dozens of applications to become the first-ever football coach at Mountain View High School included one that stopped the hiring process in its tracks, one that sounded too good to be true.
Wayne Jones’ resume included the following:
Quarterback, Purdue Boilermakers, 1956-59.
Head coach, Marion High School (Indiana), undefeated state champions, 1968.
Assistant coach, Purdue and Cincinnati, 1970-76.
Assistant coach, Arizona, 1977-1978.
Not only that, in 1987 Jones and his family lived near the new high school on Tucson’s far northwest side.
The Mountain View administration acted quickly. It offered Jones the job only to learn that it had rushed the process, eager to hire a man of Jones’ qualifications and get started. It was forced to reopen the coaching search and force Jones to reapply.
Jones, who had left coach Tony Mason’s Arizona staff in 1979 to become a sales executive for a national industrial supply firm, was aching to get off the road and back into coaching. Once all the t’s were crossed and i’s dotted in the hiring process, Jones was again a coach.
It wasn’t easy. The Mountain Lions went 0-10 his first season, 1988.
But as the school grew, Jones’ coaching chops became manifest. By 1991, Mountain View went 9-2, reaching the state quarterfinals. A year later, Jones’ club went 10-2, losing to undefeated state champion Sabino in a thrilling semifinal game, 14-10.
And in 1993, Mountain View didn’t lose a game, going 14-0 — so dominant it routed Sahuaro 63-32 in the state championship game at Arizona Stadium.
Jones didn’t do it by himself. He surrounded himself with top assistant coaches, such as 1970s Arizona football standouts Mike Dawson and Paul Schmidt.
With most state championship seasons, a little serendipity is involved, and Jones’ Mountain Lions had their share of good fortune. Before the 1991 school year, Gerard Schmidtke — a dentist from Stevens Point, Wisconsin — relocated his family and dental practice to Tucson. They moved to the new North Ranch development, about a mile from the Mountain Lions’ football field.
The Schmidtke family included sophomore running back Kevin and freshman quarterback Gabe. By the ‘93 season, they had become the leading faces of Tucson prep football.
Gabe Schmidtke , star running back Kevin Schmidtke’s younger brother and Mountain View’s quarterback in 1993, eventually accepted a scholarship to Oregon State.
Kevin Schmidtke gained 2,522 yards his senior season, giving him a career total of 5,410 — by far the highest total in Tucson prep football history and a state record. Gabe Schmidtke was a dual-threat quarterback who would go on to accept a scholarship to play at Oregon State.
The Game of Year in Tucson prep football in 1993 was a showdown between Mountain View and Sabino, played before 7,500 fans at Tucson High School on a chilly December evening. Kevin Schmidtke rushed for 193 yards and got considerable help from offensive linemen Mike O’Haver and Robert Sentelle, as well as all-city linebacker Ben Lee and lineman LeJon Brown, who blocked a late-minute field goal attempt to preserve a 25-24 victory.
As I sat in the cold bleachers at THS that night, I became absorbed by Schmidtke’s toughness and talent. In the previous decade I had watched future Pac-10 running backs such as Amphi’s Michael Bates (Arizona), Mario Bates (ASU), Jon Volpe (Stanford) and Sunnyside’s David Adams (Arizona) and thought Schmidtke was a better high school player than any of them.
Schmidtke didn’t have five-star speed or size, but as a 17-year-old, he was unstoppable. He was the kind of player you must have to win a state championship. His career at Arizona was unspectacular — he gained 774 yards as a four-year backup, 1994-97 — but he was a special high school player that comes along once a generation. (He now operates a dental practice in Tucson, near his old high school).
Mountain View High School linebacker Ben Lee takes down Sahuaro quarterback Steve Horton during their 1993 game.
It wasn’t that Jones didn’t suffer misfortune as he built Mountain View’s state championship team. The club’s top lineman, and perhaps the top lineman in the city, Marty Young, tore his ACL in early October and missed the rest of the season.
Jones became an iconic figure at Mountain View, winning 134 games until he retired from coaching in 2006. The football facility at the school was named in his honor in 2016.
