A Town United: East Bernard's Unforgettable Season of Heartbreak and Hope

East Bernard was about to load the buses for the biggest game of the year against Ganado when an email popped up on head coach Daniel Ball’s computer. He had a package to pick up at the admin office. 

Ball debated whether to even retrieve it. He was too amped to get distracted, razor-focused on his first test as the Brahmas’ head coach. It was probably just that extra coach’s headset he’d ordered, anyway.

But a gut feeling tugged him to the office to grab it. When he arrived, the packaging looked different from what he expected. Confused, he sliced the tape and opened the box. He uncovered a series of hats, each with the words ‘Earn It’ stitched on the crown. He sucked in a breath, unconsciously holding it as the realization dawned on him.

These were the last hats former East Bernard head coach Jeremy Jenkins, one of his closest friends and former boss, had ordered before the car accident that killed him and his wife, Brandy, one week before the season. 

In the pregame locker room, right before East Bernard ran out of the tunnel, Ball showed the team the hats.

“It’s not a coincidence that these came in today,” Ball said.

That night, East Bernard overcame a 14-point halftime deficit, the Brahmas charging back to earn every bit of a 35-33 win over Ganado in Dave Campbell’s ‘Game of the Week.’ 

Ball believes that win over the preseason state championship favorites was the turning point for the Brahmas’ regular season, which ended last Friday night with a 9-1 record and the first district championship since 2020. But he’s hesitant to tell that story. At first, he didn’t even want it printed. He cringes whenever he hears people say everything happens for a reason, and he doesn’t want to sound like he believes that. Because he lived 200 yards away from the Jenkins family, and he can tell you firsthand there’s no reason for people as good as Jeremy and Brandy were to die and leave behind three beautiful boys. 

After the accident, Ball became East Bernard’s head coach, stepping into a position that was impossible to fill. He’s a first-time head coach. His team is coming off a state semifinals appearance. And they’re all still gutted over losing their larger-than-life leader one day after the first preseason scrimmage. 

“I don’t think enough people understand the heavy load that lies on that man’s shoulders,” East Bernard superintendent Courtney Hudgins said. “You’re coming into what was going to be a very successful season. You’ve lost your best friend and his wife, who was best friends with your wife. You’re dealing with all of that emotion, but you’re also supposed to guide these young men playing, and be a shoulder for the coaching staff.”

In this turbulent time, steering the East Bernard ship in stormy waters, Ball has so many questions, from the smallest details about leading a football program to the existential questions about why this happened. And the guy he used to lean on for all those answers is no longer here. He’s sitting in his seat. 

“He was really influential in my career and where I’ve grown as a coach,” Ball said. “He was always somebody that I went to for advice. Not having that guy to go to anymore has been really hard.”

This Thursday, November 12th, will mark three months since Jeremy and Brandy Jenkins passed. Every Friday night in East Bernard has been a whiplash of emotions. But the start of the playoffs lining up with the tragic anniversary is probably the best example of how every football game unites a small town and breaks its heart all over again at the same time. Because there are so many reminders of Brandy and Jeremy, from the little things, like those ‘Earn It’ hats, to their living legacies in their three boys: East Bernard wide receivers coach Tyson Jenkins, senior wide receiver Gage, and sophomore Jake. If those boys keep showing up, then you’d better believe this community will, too. And, slowly, they’ll get through their hardest season like they have every other. Together.

“It’s posted everywhere around town: ‘Brahma family all in,’” Ball said. “I think this whole situation has just embodied that. This town has wrapped its arms around Coach Jenkins’ boys.”

Mike Nally thought his friend Jeremy Jenkins had lost his mind. 

The two roommates lived in Tyler, Texas, a couple of guys in their mid-20s, overgrown kids trying to figure out the rest of their lives. Jeremy worked at a BMW dealership, his dry wit inking sale after sale. Mike worked at a local Tex-Mex restaurant called Mercado’s.

One night, Jeremy told Mike he wanted to quit the BMW gig and get hired at Mercado’s. Could Mike help him?

 “Why would you want to get on at Mercado’s?” Mike asked. “You’re making a whole lot of money selling cars.”

“Man, I’m obsessed with that one waitress, Brandy Travelstead,” Jeremy said.

Sensing his buddy had it bad for Brandy, Mike made him a deal: if Jeremy could get him an interview for his job at the dealership, he’d make sure Jeremy got hired at Mercado’s.

“My brother got the job at BMW,” Melissa High School head coach Matt Nally said. “Jeremy went to Mercado’s and met Brandy Travelstead.” 

Mike got more money. But Jeremy won that trade. He married Brandy less than two years later, in January 2004. 

Over the years, Jeremy’s friends would tease him, asking how in the world he got Brandy to marry him, outkicking his coverage so far. But those who knew the couple best, like Matt Nally, saw Jeremy’s secret superpower hidden within the gruff exterior. He was hilarious. 

“The thing I miss about Jeremy the most is his laugh,” Nally said. “His laugh was very short and to the point. He didn’t laugh that much. If he laughed, and you made him laugh, it made you feel great – like you accomplished something for the day.”

Once, Nally went over to Jeremy’s brother Greg’s house for a game of Texas Hold ‘Em. After a couple of hands, Jeremy casually put on a ski mask and continued playing. Everyone at the table started chuckling as they noticed, one by one. Jeremy showed zero emotion, eyes on his cards like nothing was out of the ordinary. He had a lure in the water, and he was waiting for somebody to bite.

Finally, they did. 

“Why are you wearing that mask?” someone asked him.

“Because I’m robbing you guys,” Jeremy said.

“You should’ve seen Brandy,” Nally said. “She was laughing, and you could tell she was smitten in that moment. You could tell that she really loved Jeremy.” 

At that moment, she’d follow him anywhere. Jeremy sure tested that. He started his coaching career at Cayuga in East Texas, then went to Mobeetie up in the Panhandle, then ventured to Melissa in the Dallas area. Next was Tenaha on the Louisiana border, then Mount Enterprise, back to Tenaha, and now two hours west to Harmony.  She traveled around the state with him, by his side at every stop on a winding journey, including the night the road ended too soon on State Highway 60 in East Bernard.

Some have wondered why Jeremy couldn’t stay in one place. The leading theory is that he couldn’t turn his brain off, always seeking a new problem to solve. 

“Jeremy was a super genius,” Nally said. “He would get bored, and be like, ‘Ok, I’m going to do something else.’ That’s why I think he moved a lot, and that’s why I think he kind of started to focus on the football world, too. Football is always a chess game. Whereas, in basketball, you get away with having a good guard.”

Edgewood superintendent Scott Tyner coached with Jeremy at Tenaha in 2018. One Saturday night, after a long day of game-planning, Tyner was decompressing with a cocktail and some college football. It was 10:00 p.m., prime time for the Pac-12 after dark, and USC vs Washington was on the TV. 

Suddenly, Jeremy called him. 

“Food for thought,” Jeremy said. “What if we move the safety down against the wing-back and play a six-man front next week?”

“Alright,” Tyner said.

“Then, when they motion –”

“Jeremy, where’s Brandy?”

“She’s in bed.”

“It’s 10 on a Saturday. Your wife is an 11. Go get in bed with her. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tyner said, hanging up before Jeremy could respond.

Jeremy was restless: one day content to retire at a school, the next day hell-bent on a new challenge somewhere else. Yes, the Jenkinses were nomads. But they also established roots at every stop. In 52 years of life, Jeremy fixed a lot more problems in a lot more places than most people do in 80. So, now it feels like every region in the state has been affected by their loss. And they’re all doing something about it, too, swooping in to help the Jenkins family in an attempt to repay them for their service.  

“Let me tell you what came out of this that just blew my mind – how much the state of Texas and the football community wrapped their hands around his boys,” Jeremy’s brother, Greg Jenkins, said. “It wasn’t just about the GoFundMe. It was about the outpouring of love and prayers, and the funeral service. There’s so much bad that people see in this. But there’s a hell of a lot of good that’s come out of this that’s made me feel good about people.” 

I’d love to write that after all those travels, Jeremy and Brandy Jenkins had finally found a permanent home in East Bernard. Everyone interviewed in this story can say for certain that he loved this place. But knowing Jeremy, they can’t say for certain whether or not he might’ve heard about a team in El Paso that needed help and called the U-Haul. But his three sons have also lived all over the state, at some point dreaming of playing high school football at all the different schools their dad coached. At first, they wanted to play for Tenaha, then for Melissa, then for Mount Enterprise. But now, they can only ever imagine playing for East Bernard. 

“After the accident, the first thing they told me when I got down there, they’re like, ‘Uncle Greg, we’re not leaving here,’” Greg said. “The boys are like, ‘We want to graduate from here.’”

On the first day of school this fall, East Bernard superintendent Courtney Hudgins was making her rounds at the middle school when she lingered by Brandy Jenkins’s science classroom. When the bell rang, a gaggle of kids streamed out of class murmuring about how fun and cool Mrs. Jenkins was. Hudgins was so excited at that moment. She’d tried to recruit Brandy to the middle school for two years, knowing her vivacious personality would be a hit with the kids. 

Brandy only got three days with her students. In the week after the accident, Hudgins thought a lot about what could have been. One day, the substitute teacher in Brandy’s classroom called her. She had to come see this. 

When Hudgins arrived at the classroom, a stack of papers sat on the teacher’s desk. On the first day of school, Brandy had given her kids an assignment to observe her and the room around them, jotting down notes on why each observation was important. The project was a fun way to introduce the kids to scientific reasoning. Hardly any teacher assigns a task on the first day of school, but Hudgins was so glad Courtney had. As she rifled through the papers, Brandy’s final days came to life on the pages. Over and over, the kids wrote about three themes: Mrs. Jenkins loved her boys, she loved her Brahmas, and she loved flowers. 

Matt Nally attended Frankston High School with Brandy. At Jeremy and Brandy’s memorial service, he described a young Brandy Travelstead as the school’s Kelly Kapowski: every guy wanted to be with her, and every girl wanted to be her. The two worked together at Dairy Queen. During a slow shift, all the kids sat in the kitchen and talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Above all, Brandy Travelstead said she wanted to be a mother. 

Yes, Jeremy took Brandy to plenty of different towns around Texas. But Brandy wasn’t just along for the ride. Those kids who observed her classroom on that first day of school saw all the pictures of her sons strung on the walls and knew she had everything she’d ever wanted. 

“Jeremy kind of walked around like he was the man of the house,” Nally laughs. “But she was running that place.”

As the head of a household with four wild boys – three sons and one Jeremy – Brandy’s favorite night was Friday. Her husband was coaching, and her sons were on the sidelines, first as ball boys, then as players. Everyone was in one spot. But she still watched her boys like a hawk.

Once, when Jeremy was a defensive assistant coach at Melissa High School, he was so engrossed in the game that he didn’t notice his youngest son, Jake, had abandoned his ball boy duties. Jake had to pee. As Jeremy frantically signaled defensive plays so his defense could make a stand in the red zone, Jake jogged onto the field – in the middle of a varsity game – making a beeline for the fieldhouse bathroom on the other side of the stadium. 

One of Melissa’s assistant coaches, with an eagle-eyed view from the press box, noticed him first. 

“Does anyone see that Jake Jenkins is on the field?” he said over the headset.  

Then, he started narrating like he was a play-by-play announcer calling a Jake Jenkins touchdown run.

“Guys, Jake Jenkins is on the 40. Jake Jenkins is on the 30. Jake Jenkins has made it to the 20.” 

But Jake never got there. Because Brandy, like a defender in hot pursuit, had stormed onto the field without thinking, closing the gap for a chase-down tackle.

“Oh, OK, here we go, Brandy’s got him.”

Jake is a sophomore in high school now. He’s old enough now to know better than to run across the field without pads in a live game. But he’s still too young not to have his mother there to catch him when he inevitably steps in the wrong direction, like all high school boys do. That’s why Jeremy’s brother, Greg, abandoned his post as Martin’s Mill High School’s state championship basketball coach to move down to East Bernard for a month and attend to a far more important job.

“I told him, ‘Like you always do, it’s ready, shoot, aim,’” his friend, Scott Tyner, said. “He immediately jumped into the fire and tried to be the parental figure.”

Even for brothers, Greg and Jeremy were almost indescribably close. Their parents divorced when Greg was in the third grade, and Jeremy was just four years old. Their father got custody, but as a railroad engineer, he was gone for long stretches. That made Greg, before he was even ten, a hybrid of an older brother and father figure.

They grew up in a devout Baptist family where Tuesday youth groups and Sunday church were non-negotiable. Greg is secure enough in his personal relationship with God to admit that he was angry at Him for months. Some days, he still is. Not a day has gone by when he hasn’t wondered why, or why both of them?

“I have days where I’m sky-high, and I know they’re in Heaven and everything’s good,” Greg said. “Then, I’ll have two days of absolute misery. I’ll go on for a week pouting.”

But Greg can admit he’s been mad at God because he knows he’ll never lose faith. What he fears most is that he can’t say the same for everyone else. He hopes that Jeremy and Brandy’s death will bring people closer to God. Maybe that will be a silver lining in the clouds of this terrible storm. But there’s also the scary possibility it’ll turn people the other way. And it’s still too early in the process to convince them, as well as he wants to, otherwise. 

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘Your God that you trust in, why in the world would he do something like this?’” Greg said. “And, to be as raw as I can be, sometimes I don’t have that answer.”

The four-hour car rides from his home in Tyler to his brother’s family in East Bernard are the hardest. Nothing except the open road can distract him from his own thoughts. After four weeks in East Bernard full-time, Greg and his wife backed off a bit because they noticed Jeremy and Brandy’s oldest son, Tyson, stepping into the family’s leadership vacuum. Now, he normally spends three days a week in East Bernard, usually for all the JV and varsity football games. But he doesn’t know if that’s too much, or too little. He doesn’t want to kneecap Tyson’s growth, but he doesn’t abandon the boys, either.

“When you’re leaving the boys, you feel guilty,” Greg said. “Then, when you’re headed back down, you’re thinking, ‘I’m in their way.’ It’s a real internal struggle for me to figure out where I’m supposed to be.”

But he finds solace in the fact that he’s not alone. 

As if this situation wasn’t already difficult enough, one of the most frustrating parts of the recovery efforts is that the Jenkinses' estate is frozen, and the life insurance hasn’t been paid out. Jeremy listed Brandy as his beneficiary on every document, and Brandy did the same with Jeremy. With both of them gone, the money the boys need is tied up.

In this void, the East Bernard community has stepped in. They’ve set up a MealTrain calendar for the three boys, cooking a hot meal for them every night. Every week when Greg shows up, someone has dropped off more pallets of water, shaving cream, and razors. We’re now three months removed from the accident, and the townsfolk are still flooding in to help as if it happened yesterday. 

“If people could see what the East Bernard community is doing… The East Bernard community does 100 times more than what I or any of our family members do,” Greg said.

At Jeremy and Brandy’s memorial service, Greg told the congregation that above the donations, what the Jenkins family needed the most was prayers. To him, one of the most unbearable parts of a tragedy like this is the silence that follows from people being scared to reach out. He called the community to action, begging them to be there for those boys. 

Maybe God hasn’t given an answer yet for why this happened, and maybe He won’t for a long time. But until then, the Jenkins family sees signs of Him in all the humans who have refused to stay silent.

“Anything that we needed, even if it was just to talk or help feed somebody, somebody was there waiting, begging, ‘Let me help you,’” Superintendent Hudgins said. “I know it brought our community closer. I think it has reprioritized what’s important in life. Some of the petty things that can go on, and all the weight on how much you win – none of that is No. 1 anymore.  It’s really about taking care of each other. That’s the goodness in mankind that’s keeping us afloat.”

Near the end of Jeremy and Brandy’s memorial service, after all the laughs about the couple’s best stories – Jeremy’s poker ski mask, or trading his BMW job to go see about a girl – Edgewood ISD superintendent turned to the East Bernard football team with a final message.

“You guys have the opportunity to write the greatest Coach Jeremy story that’s ever been written,” Tyner said. 

As covered, Jeremy Jenkins was a traveler, bouncing from school to school, seeking another project to occupy his hyperactive mind. But in the last months of his life, it felt like he’d finally found what he was looking for. He’d gush to Greg over the summer about how many athletes East Bernard had down to the fifth grade, or how many guys they’d just brought to the regional track meet. He had a five-year plan for the program, and last year’s state semifinal run was just the beginning.

“I can’t put into words how excited he was about this team,” Greg said. “He was giddy about it. He’d call me and say, ‘If you could just see what we’ve got here.’”

Over the last three months, Greg has finally seen what his brother was talking about. Not only are the varsity and JV teams both 9-1 district champions, but the eighth grade and seventh grade teams haven’t lost a game all season. It’s a bittersweet feeling seeing the program your brother built, but not having him here to enjoy it with you.

But above the athletes and the wins, Greg has realized something about this East Bernard team that couldn’t be conveyed over the phone. This group is resilient. In three months, they’ve faced more adversity than most teams do in a lifetime, and yet here they are, with a district championship trophy in the case and a potential playoff run in front of them.

“Jeremy and Brandy passed away,” Greg said. “The very next week, the middle school principal’s daughter died in a car wreck. The next week, they lost their starting quarterback for the year. That’s a mouthful. I don’t know how you overcome all of that. But, by goodness, they have, man.”

Like Tyner said, their resilience is writing the greatest Coach Jeremy story of them all, because this type of response is what got Jenkins fired up most.

Last December, Jenkins talked to Dave Campbell’s about East Bernard’s magical run to the state semifinals. The Brahmas had started the year 0-3, then limped into the playoffs after an embarrassing 59-6 loss to Tidehaven. But with the season on the brink, the Brahmas bounced back. 

East Bernard beat three top-ten teams in a row in improbable fashion. First was a last-second win over Poth on a double-reverse, lateral kickoff return. Then, they stifled Lexington, the state’s most high-powered offense, by forcing nine punts and intercepting three passes. Finally, the Brahmas got revenge against Tidehaven, rallying from a 31-19 deficit with four minutes remaining for a three-point victory. 

Jenkins was talking to us on the phone, but you could almost hear his smile on the other end of the line. And, keep in mind, this was one of the funniest guys in the state who didn’t laugh or smile very much. 

“This is why athletics are so awesome,” Jenkins said. “A month ago (against Tidehaven), the wheels fell off and this whole community was humiliated. But in life, the wheels are going to fall off. Somebody will get cancer. You’ll lose your job. If you keep your composure, stick together, and continue to do the right thing, you can overcome it. That’s the beauty of athletics. It mimics life.”

Jeremy and Brandy may be gone, but their work on this Earth is not finished. Their impact lives on in the 2026 East Bernard Brahmas. And every Friday night, for however many more Friday nights this team gets, is a tribute to them.