Ellison building new culture at Cigarroa

It didn’t take long for Cigarroa Toros football players to find out what type of coach Lawrence “Benny” Ellison is.

“I’m always late, I live far away from school,” quarterback Israel Gonzalez said after the team’s 7-on-7 games at United South High School on May 21. “It was the first time I ever had a coach call my dad or personally text him because I was late … It was surprising to me, but that’s when I knew that he wanted us to turn around those 0-10 seasons.”

Ellison, who arrived in Laredo at the start of February, has already been hard at work laying the foundation for success at Cigarroa, both in the short term and long term. The longtime coach joins the Toros with a wealth of experience at a variety of programs across the high school and collegiate levels — including programs with challenges similar to those he’ll face at Cigarroa.

“A lot of the places I’ve been are very similar to Cigarroa,” Ellison said. “They’re a struggling program, struggling with numbers and not winning a lot of games. But (Principal Armando Molina) is a great salesman, and the more I visited with him and some of the coaches in the area, it sounded like a really good situation.”

“It’s a place that’s just starving for success. It has good kids, good blue-collar, hardworking kids, which is what you want when you’re trying to build a program.”

So one of Ellison’s first courses of action was to recruit more players. That meant he and his newly assembled staff strolled up and down the hallways of the high school, pitching students on giving football a try. When he got the kids in the door, Ellison focused on creating an environment that would keep them coming back.

“You’ve got to make it something they want to be a part of,” Ellison said of his efforts to grow the Toros roster. “The kids that are in there, you’ve got to make sure that they’re enjoying it … but there’s a happy medium between just going out to play football every day and the hard work it takes to prepare for that.”

Once they found that balance, word began to spread.

“The kids have really bought in and worked hard, and that’s the main thing, the kids’ word of mouth. ‘It’s different, it’s fun. Come on down,'” Ellison said.

And when Ellison has kids starting to buy in, that’s when he lays the framework for what he wants Cigarroa football to look like. At the core, it’s about working hard, being consistent and being a role model. Toros players had to adjust to the intensity and competitiveness of the new system, but Ellison’s passion and authenticity have the players rearing to go.

“He’s just one of those people that you just talk to and get fired up,” Guadalupe Hernandez said. “You talk to him for five minutes and you want to go hit somebody.”

Gonzalez said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a backup, starter or anything. He’s going to treat you the same. He expects the same thing, the highest standard from everybody … We feed on his energy. Lifting, on the field, strength, conditioning, it doesn’t matter what it is, he gets us hyped.”

Now that the first layer of the program’s culture has been established, Ellison has been able to dive deeper into the technicalities of the sport and season preparation instead of focusing on recruiting and acclimating to a new staff. That’s when the program begins to sell itself, Ellison said.

“The great thing is that we’ve got enough kids in the program now that every day you miss, the guy behind you is catching up. And they’ve bought into that system,” Ellison said. “They understand that to get on the field, they have to be here every day and work hard, and that’s kind of been a learning process for some. But the kids that may not be as talented as others are seeing that if they show up every day, they’re in the drills, coaches know who they are and are working with them.”

And while he and the Toros have made major strides over the past few months, they’re about to enter a critical period.

“Summer is always about keeping the numbers up,” Ellison said. “Kids can’t disappear in the summer because all that work they’ve done since February, if they stop, they’re going to lose it all by the time August comes around. So, they’ve got to be here this summer, and we’re going to make sure to take care of them, look out for them. We want them to be rested because football is a long season.”