Aaron Jimenez is new Burnet boys soccer head coach

CAPTION: Aaron Jimenez (wearing a badge and standing on the sideline) was on the Marble Falls Independent School District boys soccer staff when the Mustangs won the 2024 District 25-4A championship and two playoff games, including this one against San Antonio Fox Tech. Here he watches former player Omar Torres split the defense en route to helping the Mustangs win match 5-0 in the second round of the playoffs. Staff photo by Jennifer Fierro

The Burnet High School boys soccer program has a new head coach.

He is Aaron Jimenez, who was the Florence High School girls soccer head coach during the 2025-26 school year and the Killeen Harker Heights girls soccer head coach during the 2024-25 school year. He guided the Lady Knights to a bi-district championship in 2025 before joining the Florence staff.

His hire was approved April 20 by the Burnet Consolidated Independent School District Board of Trustees.

“I just felt like in talking with him and people who have been with him and things that he’s done professionally, I just feel like he was the right person at the right time,” Burnet Consolidated Independent School District athletic director Grant Freeman said.

This season Florence went 5-11-3 overall and 4-8-2 in District 25-4A, the same district Burnet finished second in. The Lady Dawgs beat the Lady Buffs 6-1.

Freeman was the Brownwood High School football team’s offensive coordinator when Jimenez was on the team. Jimenez graduated in 2016 and Freeman also left Brownwood at the end of that school year to become the offensive coordinator at Wichita Falls High School.

“I’ve known Aaron a long time, I’ve known his family,” the athletic director said. “Things kind of fall in line in a certain way, and I have a certain way of doing things, I have a certain way of hiring, and I think that’s been evident in what we’ve done on our boys’ soccer side.”

Freeman said it’s common practice to do entrance and exit interviews with coaches during the school year. He did that with former Bulldogs head coach Benjamin Boorman. Those conversations centered around what Boorman encountered when he joined the Burnet CISD staff and a vision for the future.

The two talked about the personnel in the program and the youth who wear the Kelly green, and Boorman recommended the next head coach have an understanding and deep appreciation for what the Bulldogs stand for, their home life and the values their parents and grandparents pass to them.

“(Boorman) felt like if we could find somebody that could identify with (them) and move forward, that (the program) could really take the next step,” Freeman said. “It’s funny. After I talked to coach Boorman about those things that we felt like we needed to do to go forward, I interviewed Aaron. And a lot of the things he said and did and, again I know his family and know his background, are the things that he said in the interview. They were exactly the things that we talked about. Sometimes things line up well, and that’s really what hit it off for me, just the vision and the things that he wants to do to take it from where it is and make it better.”

Though the two have a history, Freeman conveyed that the Burnet “standard is the standard.”

“Obviously having played for me there’s a relationship there and that’s all well and good,” he said. “I’m not coaching anymore. And that’s what I reminded Aaron. I’m not coaching anymore, I’m just here to uphold and move the bar up here at Burnet, and so that’s gonna be the expectation for our soccer program.”

Jimenez has ties to Burnet County. He was the coach of the Marble Falls Middle School boys soccer team in 2022 that went 8-0. The seventh-graders on that team include Ismayl Ismaylov and Jett Marcum and the eighth-graders were Joaquin Aguilar, Jose Campos, Daniel Dominguez, David Dominguez, Demarco Davis, Will Guzman, Aaron Luna, Raul Moran Luna and Drake Taylor.

All of those players were on this year’s varsity that went 18-4-5, won the District 26-4A crown with a 10-1-1 record and made school history by reaching the Class 4A Division I state semifinal.

By the time those players were in high school, Jimenez was on the sideline as part of former head coach Rick Hoover’s staff. By the end of the 2023-24 season, when the Mustangs went 20-6, won the District 25-4A crown with a 9-1 record and lost to Boerne High 2-1 in the third round of the playoffs, Jimenez had decided he was ready to become a head coach and took over at Harker Heights.

“I tried to get him to stay at Marble when I got the head job,” Mustangs head coach Ryan Craven said. “But he really wanted to be a head coach. He’s a good guy.”

When Jimenez joined the Florence staff, he answered to former athletic director Robert Draper, who was a Marble Falls High School football and powerlifting coach when the soccer coach was on staff.

Freeman said Jimenez will meet the Bulldogs after state testing concludes.

CAPTION: The 2022 Marble Falls Middle School boys soccer team, coached by Aaron Jimenez (standing, left), that went 8-0 includes some familiar faces. Many of these Mustangs were on the varsity team that reached the Class 4A Division I state semifinal in 2026. File photo