(By ADAM O’DAY)

Everyone has that one high school teacher or coach who had a positive impact in their life. For many students and athletes hailing from a Temple area school district, Byron Bundy is that person.

Bundy is an assistant football coach and head coach for the boys’ soccer team at Little River-Academy High School. Bundy has coached football for more than 20 years, and has positively impacted countless lives.

The coaching style that made Bundy so popular with his players is to focus more on his students’ and athletes’ personal development, which was heavily reinforced at his previous coaching job.

Before coaching at Little River-Academy, he coached at Keller High School, near Fort Worth, for 11 years.

“The years at Keller were some of my favorite years coaching,” Bundy says. “Kevin Atkinson (who hired Bundy) was big on the impact you made on the kids. He strongly encouraged, almost made mandatory, wanting us coaches to have dinner with the athletes at our house once a week.”

For Bundy, coaching is about building relationships.

“That was probably one of the greatest things I got to do in coaching; build relationships with the kids outside of football and outside the field house where they got to see the real side of me.”

Bundy went from a 6A school in his last job to a 3A school, and it was a bit of a culture shock for him and his family, but they’ve enjoyed it. “As my son Blake learned, you play both sides of the ball [offense and defense], which makes it harder to put in different schemes.”

The smaller environment does encourage students to be involved in more than just one sport or club. Coach Bundy’s son Blake, for example, plays football, soccer and runs track, and has been involved in competitions for Future Farmers of America.

“[The small school environment] gives the students and parents more experiences,” Bundy says.

The most important thing Bundy has learned in his 20-plus years of coaching is that nothing is as important as how you make a kid feel. “You’re not going to remember everything you learned in world history sophomore year, but you will remember how a teacher or coach treated you.”

This philosophy has made Byron Bundy one of the most popular coaches and teachers at nearly every school that he’s worked for. He still maintains contact “with kids” he coached more than a decade ago.

“The more you care about them at school, the better chance that they’ll grow and have a better adult life.”