Numbers illustrate passion playing for Burnet CISD
CAPTION: Casey Schubert (back, left) has rejoined the Burnet Consolidated Independent School District as a teacher and coach. Staff photos by Jennifer Fierro
With Sonny Wilson accepting the promotion of becoming the Burnet Middle School girls coordinator, the BMS athletic department is on the hunt for one more coach for the boys.
The aim is to have five coaches for the boys and five for the girls, Burnet Consolidated Independent School District athletic director Grant Freeman said.
One of those girls coaches is Casey Schubert, who served as the Burnet High School cross country head coach and assistant track coach almost a decade ago. Before that, she was the Marble Falls High school volleyball coach.
The biggest reason why each BMS office has five middle school coaches is to ensure the athletes are getting the coaching they need in order to learn the fundamentals and the basics of each sport, Freeman said.
“Our participation number is equal,” he said. “Our girls are rivaling our boys, even with the football aspect, which is outstanding.”
The seventh grade had 142 girls in volleyball, basketball and track and field, while the eighth grade had 132.
A total of 166 seventh-grade boys participated in football, basketball and track and field and the eighth grade had 161.
And that brings up a whole other challenge, the athletic director pointed out.
“Where we get limited is not actually by ourselves, it’s actually by our competition around us,” the athletic director said. “A lot of people don’t run four teams at the middle school. They run three or two teams and maybe a combo B team. So it’s really by who we can play. We run as many as we can, as many teams as we can. And that’s the biggest thing to us.”
Freeman indicated he and the high school staff are pleased with the number of participants in those grades.
What has caught their attention, however, are the high school numbers.
The number of freshman boys who were athletes was 151 during the 2025-26 school year.
One hundred freshman girls were athletes during the 2025-26 school year with 81 sophomores, 45 juniors and 48 seniors.
“Our job is to make that caveat not jump so much from eighth to ninth,” Freeman said. “On the boys’ side, it works a little better. There’s not as big a jump. It’s really the girls’ side, where it jumps so much, and we want to try to try to eliminate that. And that’s where I think somebody like Sonny helps us do that.”
Freeman noted the many challenges of hiring coaches who fit a specific teaching field on top of their ability to get more out of each of their athletes.“I think there’s so many buckets to coaches and all different kinds of people can be successful,” he said. “There’s the supermotivator kind, the one that just has the charge and the passion and the kids want to follow and even coaches want to follow. That energy is contagious, and that kind of coach is very successful. There’s also the egghead type that just falls in love with the logistics of the game and all of those things. And they may not be the biggest personality, and they can be successful. But what I’ve found in doing this for a long time is you can’t have a staff full of eggheads and you can’t have only the other side of it as well. You can’t have a staff full of energy people. It has to be the perfect mix of both.”
CAPTION: Burnet High School coach Brent Kelley (left) and Burnet Consolidated Independent School District athletic director Grant Freeman share a laugh as the Lady Dawgs take a short breather before starting their conditioning.
