ODESSA, Mo. — Odessa head football coach Mark Thomas had a fairly typical career trajectory for a high school football head coach — a succession of progressively larger schools from Osceola to Odessa to Boonville to Kearney to Belton, winning four state titles with three of those programs along the way.
“You kind of — for lack of a better term — climb the corporate ladder and try to go move up to bigger and bigger schools,” Thomas said.
Thomas said an offhand comment from his wife, Judy, as they drove across Interstate 70 to visit her son in St. Louis in 2013 changed things.
“My wife just made the comment as we were driving across, she said, ‘Have you ever thought about going back to a smaller school?’” Thomas said. “It got me thinking about my career a little bit at that point.”
That career for Thomas — a Boonville native, who played running back for the Missouri Class 3A champion Pirates in 1974 — started in 1980 as the head coach at Osceola, but he decided he was in over his head and took a step back.
Thomas joined Pete Adkins’ staff for four seasons at Jefferson City — a program that won nine state championships, including one in 1984 — before his first stint at Odessa in 1985.
During Thomas’ first season, the Bulldogs made the Missouri state playoffs for the first time, but he left after three seasons for the college ranks.
Thomas spent seven years as an assistant at the University of Central Missouri before returning to the head coaching ranks at his alma mater, Boonville, where he won a Missouri Class 3A state title in 1998.
He parlayed that success into a gig at Kearney, where he led those Bulldogs to consecutive Missouri Class 4 state titles in 2002-03.
Thomas left Kearney after the 2006 season, returning to Jeff City as an assistant coach, before a two-year stint at Belton (2011-12).
That’s when Judy got his wheels spinning about his coaching roots.
“I kept thinking back on the three years I was at Odessa back in the ’80s, the three years I was at Boonville and some of the smaller communities that I've been in,” Thomas said. “Those were my favorite years.”
One month later, the Odessa job opened.
“I said to my wife, ‘What do you think?’” Thomas said. “She said, ‘Go for it.’”
With that, Thomas returned to the Bulldogs, where he’s coached for the last 12 seasons, leading the program to a Missouri Class 3 crown in 2019.
“Odessa is very passionate about their high school football teams — always have been,” he said. “That was the attraction of coming back in 2013. ... There were five different kids on that team that I had coached a dad or an uncle so that just makes it more special for me."
Small towns like Odessa often have a deep and unique connection to their high school football team, giving the coach an outsized community impact.
“He just had a huge impact on me in realizing that, yeah, hard work does correlate to great results,” Ethan Uhrlaub, an all-state linebacker and short-yardage running back on the 2019 state-title team, said. “I think that's what the American dream is.”
Thomas, a 2020 Missouri Sports Hall of Fame inductee, called Uhrlaub “one of the toughest players” he ever coached. He credited Thomas for helping channel that toughness into tenacity.
“I'd heard of winning a state football championship, things like that, but it really took me until probably after my junior year, where we made it to the quarterfinals when it finally clicked in my brain that, ‘Wow, this is actually something that people do and can achieve,” Uhrlaub said. “Through winning that state championship and things like that, I have kind of carried that with me that, if there's some time in life where I want to really buckle down and get after something, winning and achieving it is not out of the realm of possibility.”
That can be an important lesson for a kid in Odessa. It’s the kind of lesson Ethan is glad that his younger brother, Robert Uhrlaub, experienced as a freshman last season under Thomas, who is retiring as Odessa’s head coach.
“You can tell he definitely cares about his players because he’s always correcting people and trying to make everyone as best as they can,” Robert said.
Robert Uhrlaub played offensive tackle and defensive end for the Bulldogs last season.
Thomas took over as the defensive-line coach midway through the season, so he “got a lot of one-on-one coaching” and appreciated Thomas’ dogged and repetitive approach.
“Practice is my favorite part,” said Thomas, when asked what he’ll miss about being a head football coach. “I've told my teams that. It's my favorite part because, in games, everything is final. Everything — good, bad or indifferent — there's no do-overs during games. In practice, we can work at it and work at it and work at it until we get it right — like Nick Saban says, you do it until you can't get it wrong.”
But it wasn’t just football players. Thomas also took an interest in Annie Uhrlaub.
She competed in field events and played basketball at Odessa, but she also set several weightlifting records at the school under Thomas’ tutelage.
“One of the things you’ve got to know about Coach Thomas is, while he was a phenomenal football coach, he was a coach to anybody who wanted to work hard,” Ethan said.
Thomas saw the effort and the extra hours Annie put in.
“He really invested in her,” Ethan said. “He would always invest in anybody who wanted to show up and work hard.”
He could be a tough coach, but Ethan said he appreciated that Thomas set a high standard and held student-athletes accountable for meeting it.
“Probably 25 or 30 years ago, I was a raving lunatic compared to where I am now,” Thomas said with a laugh, noting that he’d adjusted his coaching style with the times through the decades.
And there definitely were signs that Thomas has been roaming the sidelines for a very long time, Robert said, like the AC/DC pumping through the weight room speakers.
“Probably his old music he plays during weights,” he said when asked what pops to mind about Thomas, “that’s one of the things that pops into mind.”
As Thomas exits Odessa, he leaves behind an impact that transcends banners and trophies.
—