Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Eldorado coach Charlie Dotson runs players through exercises during practice. The Eagles face Manzano on Friday at Wilson Stadium. A win would give Dotson's squad a great shot at District 5-5A.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Eldorado's John Posen gets a punt off during practice. The Eagles have exceeded most expectations this season, having beaten archrivals La Cueva and Sandia, stopped Rio Rancho and even played cleat-to-cleat with powerful Clovis before succumbing to turnovers.

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Charlie Dotson is new school. Every one of his assistant coaches at Eldorado High is assigned to follow a YAFL feeder program in that part of the Far Northeast Heights.

Charlie Dotson is old school. His Eagles don't emerge from the locker room with a 21st-century vanguard of inflatable mascots, contrails of smoke, or even names on the backs of their orange jerseys. All they do is play hard between the whistles, between the lines.

"We're not going to do all that fluffy stuff," Dotson says. "We're just going to play football - then shake their hands, win or lose."

Eldorado's new coach says he sleeps well at night, as well he should with an overachieving 6-2 team that has stirred the echoes of the Eagles' past greatness.

But it's also plain that flash and fiber are locked in an internal - maybe eternal - struggle for a guy who knows that today's kids respond to more than just meat and potatoes.

Eldorado's latest taste-test comes Friday night, when it faces next-door rival Manzano (8-1) at Wilson Stadium. A win would give the Eagles a great shot at winning District 5-5A - and break a puzzling losing streak to Manzano that stretches back to the late 1990s.

Early-November pressure didn't seem like much of a possibility when Dotson took over Eldorado football, which had struggled the past two years and didn't seem to possess a load of talent entering Õ07.

But Dotson's proven, kinetic energy - he'd coached Del Norte to two big-school titles in wrestling and won another at Eldorado in Õ06 - has proven irresistible. This year's Eagles remind no one of the machine that ruled Albuquerque football for long stretches of the 1970s, Õ80s and Õ90s, but they have balanced passion and poise in ways few thought possible.

"Charlie is able to get into kids' heads," said Highland coach Gary Sanchez.

Which is sort of the point, because Dotson is very concerned with how and what his players think. (Example: He declines most post-game interviews, shuffling reporters to his players, and nearly swallowed his tongue before agreeing to speak to The Trib before the Manzano game).

Clearly, however, he's not a my-way-or-the-highway fellow, though he clearly understands that philosophy and points to his predecessors at Eldorado - David Williams, Bill Gentry, Jerry Hall, legends all - as smart, influential men whose styles worked wonders.

But, he adds, today's kids are different than yesterday's. A player who quits football, he notes, is not ostracized in the high school caste system the way he might've been a decade or two ago. Of vital import: Getting young players, even years from high school, interested in the program. Then, you've got to keep them around.

"You've got to have more of a relationship with Õem, or at least your coaches do," Dotson says of the coach-player pas-de-deux. "Where, in the past, you could tell them `This is how you're doing it, now go and do it.' "

Either way, it's working. Eldorado has handled archrivals La Cueva and Sandia, stopped Rio Rancho and even stood cleat-to-cleat with powerful Clovis before succumbing to turnovers.

After the Clovis game on Sept. 7, Dotson says he knew his club had something. Standouts like running back-linebacker Logan Lippert, lineman Tim Lutz and quarterback Austin Cantwell might be out-talented, but they weren't going to cower.

That's sort of how Dotson played ball and wrestled when he was an Eldorado athlete in the late 1980s.

"Totally intense, very, very aggressive," recalls Bill Dotson, Charlie's father and the former wrestling coach at the University of New Mexico.

"He was low-key, a little," Bill Dotson adds a few moments later. "But when it was time to play, he was always up above. (Raising him) was easy. All you had to do is get out of his way."

Of course, it's not that simple with 35 or 40 kids who aren't your own, and nobody knows it better than Charlie Dotson. All he's trying to do, he says, is set a tone, a path to follow.

"I do the practice schedule, I do the workouts, I push the pedal when I need to but those guys (his assistant coaches) are the ones who put the X's and O's together," he says.

Is that approach old school or new school? Maybe that doesn't matter. Whether you're driving a classic Cadillac or a brand-new Maserati, you want it to go like hell when the pedal is pushed.