Coach Of The Year – Dale Condict
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The 2022 football season has come and gone. Once again, the football season has just flown by. We’re nearly a month removed from the final football games of the 2022 season, and we’ve been recapping the year in football ever since. In today’s post, we step away from the players on the field and go to the coaches on the sidelines. The winner of our 2022 Prep Redzone Oklahoma Coach Of The Year award is Wagoner head coach Dale Condict. There were a lot of great choices for this year’s award but in the end, we kept going back to the legendary Wagoner coach. We break down why Condict is this year’s winner and look back on Wagoner’s run to the Class 4A title. Keep it locked into Prep Redzone Oklahoma every single day for more postseason content, including our All State Team that will be released later this week!
PREP REDZONE OKLAHOMA COACH OF THE YEAR – DALE CONDICT – WAGONER
We mentioned how there were quite a few candidates that you can make the argument for that are worthy of being coach of the year. But at the end of the day, we kept coming back to the job that Wagoner head coach Dale Condict did as he led the Bulldogs to another Class 4A state championship. And really, it comes down to one thing. They lost to Cushing 42-0 in week six. They then beat Cushing 24-21 in the state championship game. There’s the reason. We kept going back to that fact and it was hard to pick anyone other than Condict for this recognition.
Wagoner actually began the year 3-3 after going 1-2 in non-district play with the two losses coming by a combined ten points against teams that spent the majority of the season in the top five of Class 5A. Then the Bulldogs would suffer the 42-0 loss to Cushing in week six and that sparked a turnaround that was arguably the best in Oklahoma in 2022. Wagoner would win out and they would then reach new heights when the playoffs rolled around.
The defense was absolutely dominant in the postseason as they shut out Ada in the first round and then also had a shutout against perennial power Poteau in the semifinals. They went on the road and beat another perennial power in Tuttle in the quarterfinals. And they would get their rematch with district foe Cushing in the championship game. Condict acknowledged before the game that his Bulldogs were underdogs heading into the title game. But that his kids also expected to be there and the expectations at Wagoner every single season are state championships.
That’s what Condict has built over the last two decades. He has helped turn this program east of Tulsa into one of the perennial powerhouses in Class 4A every single season. While they were the underdogs coming into the championship game, it was an interesting dynamic where the underdog was actually a team that had that championship pedigree. Cushing’s group of seniors that had dominated all year hadn’t been in a championship atmosphere while Wagoner’s team recently won a championship in 2020.
Wagoner’s defense would again come up huge as they would hold a Cushing offense to just 21 points in the title game. This was an offense that made scoring 50+ points a regular occurrence throughout the year and their best defense was a ball-control offense. They kept Cushing’s offense on the sidelines when it mattered most in the fourth quarter. After the Tigers came up short on fourth down with a little over five minutes to play, Wagoner would never give the ball back. They drove down and would kick the game-winning field goal as time expired.
Condict has done a lot of great things at Wagoner. He’s won a lot of state championships and has well over 250 wins. He’s turned this program into a contender year in and year out. The Bulldogs also had the record for longest winning streak by an 11-man program before Bixby’s recent run. And despite all of that, Condict still believes that their win over Cushing in the title game was the biggest win of his coaching career. That’s good enough for us. Congratulations to Dale Condict, this year’s Prep Redzone Oklahoma Coach Of The Year.