Jon Mark Beilue: He shoots, he scores

Soccer coach Lauffer is WT’s longest-serving head coach ever

Butch Lauffer wasn’t looking for a new job as much as he was looking for lunch.

He and his dad, Robert, were deer hunting before Christmas 1990 near Eldorado, not far from San Angelo. They went to a restaurant to get a hamburger. The younger Lauffer grabbed a San Angelo Standard-Times newspaper and went to the sports section.

There was a story that West Texas State had dropped football. In the last paragraph of the short story, it read that to remain eligible for NCAA Division II athletics, the Buffaloes had to add another sport. That sport was to be men’s soccer.

Lauffer, then just 29 years old, suddenly had more than an eight-point buck on his mind that afternoon.

Mastering the art of sustainable success

The 3-2 win against Drury University on Sept. 5 marked the beginning of Lauffer’s 31st season and 30th year as men’s soccer coach at West Texas A&M University. To put that in perspective, Lauffer is the longest-serving coach at WT – ever.

That answer might win a lot of bets among Texas Panhandle sports fans, who would probably throw out Bob Schneider as a guess. Schneider coached the Lady Buffs basketball team for 25 years, from 1981 to 2006. Lauffer passed that mark in 2017.

To think his dad didn’t want Lauffer to buy a house because he knew his son, who had a bit of a nomadic life, wouldn’t be in Canyon that long. Now some 820 matches and nine conference titles later, he’s still going strong and not yet ready to step off the field.

“You find a place you like and you find a place you like working for the people you do. That’s the big thing,” Lauffer said. “I understand the limitations my bosses have had to deal with. I may not agree with all the decisions, but I have to respect the position that person holds. Sometimes their hands are tied.

“Part of my job has been to make other people’s jobs easier. The last thing I want to do is have an athletic director or someone else think, ‘Oh gosh, here he comes,’ and run the other way. So I try to help people do their job better and usually that’s reciprocated to help me do my job better.”

No coach stays anywhere for 30 years unless he does one thing consistently – win. Lauffer has made that art of sustainable success look deceptively simple. He took a startup program from nothing, quickly made the Buffs competitive, added a women’s program five years later and coached both for 14 years.

The numbers say it pretty boldly. His men’s teams entering this season are 350-157-39 with three combined Lone Star Conference/Heartland conference titles. The women’s program, which he started in 1996 and coached through the 2009 season, was 189-67-17 with six LSC titles.

“We have worked really, really hard to find good people to come into the program — not players, but people first,” Lauffer said. “If you have good people, you have a chance, because if you don’t, you can rot from within. But it’s academics, the way we play, the way we dress and act.

“Then our coaching staff has always worked hard to stay relevant and to stay on the cutting edge of the sport in helping players move on to the next level. That helps with recruiting. And lastly, and this is really important, you can look through history and people underestimate the importance of stability in a program.”

Chad Landry played at San Angelo Central High School, graduating in 1993. Robert Lauffer actually saw Landry play at Central, and referred him to his son. There weren’t a lot of opportunities 28 years ago for college soccer in Texas, especially in West Texas. Landry took Lauffer up on an invitation to walk on, and in fairly short time, earned a scholarship.

“The vision that Coach Lauffer had for the soccer program was something I wanted to be a part of,” said Landry, now a property and casualty insurance broker in Dallas. “He wanted to bring excitement of soccer to a community that had pretty much been football and basketball. It was a great time to have the opportunity to be part of something from the ground up and help an area get its hands around soccer.”

The timing seemed right

Shortly after reading that story 30-plus years ago in the San Angelo Standard-Times, Lauffer was on the phone with Holly Troth in the WT athletic department.

“Is this really true?” he asked her. “Because if it is, I’m interested.”

It was true, Troth told him. Send a resume and a copy of the soccer books you’ve authored. Lauffer quickly did. A few weeks went by and he had not heard anything.

“I was young and impatient,” he said, “and I called back and said, ‘Look, I’m really interested. I’m not pulling your chain.’”

Lauffer was invited to Canyon. Jimmy Lackey, then the alumni director, gave him a tour. Even though the facilities, athletics and otherwise, seemed somewhat quaint compared to now, Lauffer was convinced he could win at WT. The timing felt right.

Lauffer was hired in the spring of 1991 at a salary of $27,500. He had eight weeks to put together a team while helping with a schedule. Using his considerable contacts in Texas and elsewhere, he hurriedly put together a roster that went 10-8-2 in that first season in 1991. Six years later, the Buffs advanced to the NCAA playoffs for the first time.

Taking the WT job was almost an extension of what he’d been doing since high school. In the late 1970s, Lauffer was a placekicker on the Rockwall High School football team east of Dallas. He was also heavily into Texas Longhorn club soccer. James Cameron, the head football coach and athletic director, was progressive for the time.

“He told me that if I coached the team, he’d drive the bus,” Lauffer said. “So here I was, a junior in high school playing and coaching the team. That’s how the Rockwall High School soccer program got started.”

Lauffer found himself at TCU in the 1980s, playing for the Frogs and earning his degree. He worked briefly in the oil and gas business, but didn’t like it. He returned to TCU to help coach the new women’s team as a graduate assistant.

Then came an offer to bring to life a large club in Houston – the Spring soccer club -- that had fallen into dire straits. Lauffer brought the numbers up to more than 800, which included 12 Lone Star select teams. But he hungered to be part of the college game again, and luckily, that’s when he picked up that San Angelo newspaper.

Coach Butch Lauffer poses in 2016 with many — but not all — of his career trophies.

A local ambassador for the game

In those early days especially, Lauffer was more than a coach. He was an ambassador for the sport in Amarillo and Canyon, speaking to any group that would have him, tutoring the media on the strategies of the sport, working to elevate local club soccer.

“My dad told me, ‘Butch, you have a chance to have a career and not a job,’” he said. “I didn’t know what he meant then, but I do now. It was the opportunity to build something from scratch, and if you do it the right way, it has the chance to stand the test of time.”

Lauffer has numerous foreign and domestic coaching licenses, and his off-season experience is broad. He has written three books on coaching and player development.

But WT is where his bread is buttered. Eight times he’s earned coach of the year honors. His 2018 team finished 17-3-3 and to the NCAA Elite Eight. Lauffer said he may have mellowed over time, but his standards are still exacting.

“I thought I was in pretty good shape when I came to WT, but to this day, I never worked as hard and hurt as much as the first weeks I was there,” Landry said. “I had no idea what I was about to enter into.

“I had never seen soccer taught that way. I realized I was at the right place at the right time to become a better player. I came to WT as an athlete and I left as a soccer player. You can’t help but become that.”

Lauffer, now 60, has had chances to leave WT. He almost took an assistant’s position at Notre Dame, and he turned down an offer as head coach at Texas State because of a low salary. But he’s ultimately stayed in Canyon, turning WT into a regular Top 15 national program with the help of a steady stream of long-lasting assistants.

Along the way, he met wife Kimberly. They’ve been married 27 years. Daughter Kendall is in grad school at WT after graduating from the University of North Texas, and son Kyle is at Amarillo College. Another son, Blake, lives in Hurst Bedford.

“When I hit 25 years, it was, like, where have the years gone?” Lauffer said. “Coaches seem to count time by the seasons. When you sit back and have a nice glass of wine and think about it, it has been a helluva ride.”

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu .