In early February, Cameron ISD’s board of trustees approved the hiring of Rick Rhoades, who was returning to the school that he took to five state title games, winning three of them.
Rockdale High School graduate Preston Ehler, who is married to Rhoades’ daughter Jayci and was hired by CISD earlier this month, didn’t think he’d actually end up across the Little River following his father-in-law’s hiring. Particularly for the school that is Rockdale’s biggest rival.
“He always joked with me,” Ehler said. “He would say ‘you gonna come to Cameron with me?’ and I always thought he was joking.”
“But about mid-March, he asked if I really wanted to come to Cameron and I told him ‘Coach, I need some time to think about it.’ ”
Ehler, who spent the last two school years working under coach Wade Griffin at Class 4A Giddings, wasn’t looking to leave the school where he got his first job. Especially since he said Griffin made him “ten times the coach he was” when he started at GHS.
However, after thinking about it for a while, the former Tiger decided he would head to Cameron since it was a great opportunity, and it meant coming closer to home in Rockdale.
Since school ended, Ehler says he has been at Yoe High Fieldhouse every weekday for summer workouts and is already having a positive experience.
“It means a lot to me to be in a program with high expectations.” Ehler said. “Being from Rockdale, I’ve always sought out places that are very similar.”
Ehler’s specialty will be coaching cornerbacks and he will teach geography at YHS. He is still in the process of finding out whether he will coach baseball or track in the spring.
In addition to coaching at Giddings, Ehler did his student teaching at Giddings and interned under Rhoades at Gregory-Portland during the Fall of 2018.
STEPHEN—W h i l e Preston is just down the road, his older brother Stephen went approximately 180 miles away from his lifelong home to kick off his coaching career in the fall of 2020.
The elder Ehler was about to graduate from Sam Houston State University when he started looking for coaching opportunities around Texas. Then he saw an opening at Woodville, a Class 3A school near Beaumont.
“It was just one of those things.” Stephen said. “I saw the opening online and just thought I’d take a chance and that it would be a good opportunity.”
In late April 2020, he was officially hired at the East Texas school to coach running backs, baseball and teach middle school social studies.
Since making it out to Woodville, it’s been an adventure for Ehler, where the football team pushed through a competitive district to the second round of the post-season before losing to eventual Class 3A-DI state champ Columbus.
Ehler is also coming off the high of a baseball playoff run, where a young Eagle team went four rounds deep into the post-season and was two runs away from beating eventual state champion Malakoff.
“It was really about those kids and what they did every single day,” Ehler said. “And we were just fortunate to have a lot of support from the parents and everyone involved.”
“It was a great setup and everybody bought in,” he said.
Stephen Ehler is an RHS Class of 2012 graduate and is a Sam Houston alum.
Prior to his arrival in Woodville, Ehler did his student teaching at Bryan ISD.
MEETING---If WHS had beat Malakoff, they would have faced Cameron in the regional finals. With both brothers at schools holding playoff pedigrees in football and baseball, the younger Ehler said he has already thought about possibly facing his older brother in the post-season.
“We’ve talked about it already,” Preston said. “In football, we might face each other in the second or third round. In baseball, we both have young teams that made deep runs this season.
“It’s definitely something that could happen.”
The brothers are the sons of Charles and Stephanie Ehler of Rockdale.
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