"Win baby win" — How Jason Herring cast aside dentistry for a headset and became one of Texas' best coaches

Refugio’s Jason Herring is one of the most polarizing coaches in Texas high school football. He’s won 216 games and three state championships as a head coach. At times, he’s been painted out to be a ruthless, win-at-all costs signal caller. He can be seen on Friday nights pacing up and down the sideline yelling with a high-level of intensity no matter the score. Those in Refugio love him – a few outside the football-crazed town comprised of just under 2,900 people don’t. Maybe both sides would be surprised if they knew his story a little better. While Herring has taken the Texas high school football world by storm, he spent the first 12 years of his life with a much different career path in mind. Herring wanted to be a dentist. It wasn’t until his seventh-grade year in the small town of Robert Lee, Texas that Herring decided he wanted to follow in the footsteps of Nelson Coulter, who was the Steers’ head coach and athletic director at the time. Herring made the decision to pursue coaching as a career a short time after experiencing life as an athlete under Coulter and never wavered through high school and college before embarking on what has turned out to be an extremely successful career. “I don’t know why [I wanted to be] a dentist, I guess I was thinking about the money,” Herring said. “But from the minute I got in my first seventh grade football practice, within two or three weeks I go home and tell my mom and dad I’m going to be a football coach just like Coach Coulter. No question. “I fell in love. I fell in love with athletics and I fell in love with my coaches to be honest.”

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