Ryan Murken

Your Prep Sports 

IOWA CITY – It’s been nearly two decades since West High won a state football championship.   

The number of people walking the halls at West High that remember the last title for the Trojans gets a little smaller each fall.

The coaches that led West High to its second straight and third 4A title in five seasons in 1999 are gone and most of the players on the current West High roster weren’t born when the Trojans edged Cedar Falls 28-21 in overtime for the 4A crown in front of a UNI-Dome crowd of more than 16,000.

Tyler Meade remembers.

The current West High defensive coordinator will never forget it.

“I was in fifth grade and I was a ball boy,” Meade said. “That was coach (Reese) Morgan’s last year, the last year we won state in 1999. That’s how it kind of started for me.”

Really, Meade was already hooked on football and green and gold before West High won back-to-back titles in 1998 and 1999.

Mead grew up around the game.

His father was the defensive coordinator for Morgan and later the head coach at West High but it was those championship memories as a fifth grader that stuck with Meade.

“Going back to being a fifth grader we were on top and I saw what that was like,” Meade said. “I wanted to be there, I always wanted to get back there.”  

After 18 years West High has another chance to return to the top of Class 4A and Meade is a big reason why.

Top-ranked West High (12-0) will play for the state championship for the second straight season when it faces four-time defending state champion West Des Moines Dowling (11-1) in the Class 4A state title game at 7 p.m. on Friday.

Meade was named Assistant Coach of the Year by the Iowa Football Coaches Association on Monday for his work leading a West High defense that ranks among the best in the state.

“Tyler is so important to what we do,” West High coach Garrett Hartwig said. “Tyler does a lot of things behind the scenes and he is incredibly well prepared. I will shoot him a text in the evening after we have long left practice asking him a question about something I see on the film and he recalls it and he’ll answer it.”

The title season in 1999 started a lifelong relationship with West High football for Meade.

Friday’s title game will be his 202nd on the West High sideline that started back in 1999.

“It’s quite the journey,” Meade explained.

Meade has seen West High football from nearly every angle.

He kept stats on the varsity sidelines as an underclassmen and played receiver as a junior and senior.

Meade graduated in the spring of 2007 and was a volunteer assistant coach at West High the following fall.

“I was an 18-year old sophomore assistant,” Meade said. “I was the equipment coordinator, the get-back coach, back then you still had the cords on the headsets and I held those. I just did whatever they told me to do and found my role from there.”

Meade worked his way up to a varsity assistant and when Hartwig was hired as head coach prior to the 2014 season he tabbed Meade as his defensive coordinator.

In four seasons leading the West High defense Meade has turned the Trojans into one of most stingy units in Class 4A.

West High enters the Class 4A title game allowing 12 points, 98 rushing yards and 239 total yards per game.

All are the lowest totals of Meade’s four years leading the defense.

“I never even called plays as a sophomore or junior varsity coach but I had a good idea of what I wanted to do,” Meade said. “When my dad was here they did the same thing for 14 years, the same scheme. I always had in the back of my mind how could we do that and change it to work against the new spread offense.”

The climb back toward the top of Class 4A has been steady and hasn't been easy.

West High reached the playoffs just two times between 2000 and 2009 and there were some tough years along the way.

That’s part of what has made the last two seasons so special for the West High grad.

“When I first started coaching was the down years, my first two years we were 1-8 and 0-9 and there wasn’t a whole lot of hope in the community that things were going to get better,” Meade said. “It was kind of my own personal motivation of wanting to be here when we changed it and got it back going again.”