CCISD promotes from within for new Athletic Director

By TJ MAXWELL
Cove Leader-Press

The Copperas Cove athletic program has new leadership, but one is a very familiar face around Copperas Cove.
Longtime head volleyball coach Cari Lowery was named the athletic director for Copperas Cove Independent School District and Dallas ISD’s Tony F. Johnson was named head football coach in a special meeting of the CCISD board of trustees on Monday.
“It means a lot to me that my school board and superintendent believe in me and are confident in my ability to lead this coaching team and the athletic department,” said Lowery. “I’m getting congratulatory emails and calls from all over the state. Everyone I have encountered in Cove since the announcement have been so positive and excited. The response has been a little overwhelming. “I feel a great sense of pride and responsibility in taking this position.”
“Copperas Cove High School Lady Dawg volleyball coach, Cari Lowery, was promoted to CCISD Athletic Director and is one of only 30 female athletic directors in Texas’ 1,032 school districts,” said CCISD Director of Communications, Wendy Sledd, in a press release on Monday. “Lowery brings a winning record to her new position as the twelfth winningest coach in Texas high school volleyball history. Nearly 100 of Lowery’s high school volleyball players have advanced to play volleyball at the collegiate level. More than 40 of her players have returned to the court as high school and junior high volleyball coaches.”
Lowery is a native of Lake Worth and Tarleton State graduate and began her stint as head coach in 1994.
Lowery came to Copperas Cove in 2004 after serving as head volleyball coach and women’s athletic director at Springtown High School where she took the Lady Porcupines to 10 district championships in as many years.
Lowery missed the playoffs in her first two seasons at Copperas Cove but hasn’t missed one since, leading the Lady Dawgs to 17-straight playoff appearances since 2006, including district championships in 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2017.
Lowery moved into the Top 12 winningest volleyball coaches and no. 4 active coach in the state of Texas on the Texas Girls’ Coaches Association’s list of career coaching victories in August with 841 wins before adding 28 more this season.
That is where the number will stay as Lowery is stepping down from the head volleyball coach position to focus on the athletic director job duties.
“I will no longer be coaching volleyball,” said Lowery. “That was a difficult decision to make. I have been a head coach for almost 3 decades and I love coaching. I think coaching is the best job in the world and I have been blessed with an unbelievable coaching career.  I love my girls and it was not easy to tell them that I wouldn’t be coaching them next year.
“I want to focus on coaching coaches now and building a total athletic department. There is a lot to be done and I’m ready for the challenge.”
“As the Athletic Director my focus will be to build this athletic department into something that we can all be proud of,” added Lowery.  “We need to build a culture of pride and excellence. Copperas Cove is a great place to be and we need to move forward into what we can become. I want to help give every athlete, every coach and every sport the tools they need to be successful in the classroom, on the court, the track and the field. It won’t happen overnight but it can happen.”
Johnson has also been coaching since 1994 and has coached at both the collegiate level, at schools like Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and the high school level.
A native of Olathe, Kansas, Johnson earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mid America Nazarene University, in Olathe, Kansas in 1996 before earning two Master’s degrees in Liberal Arts and Education Administration.
Johnson would go on to coach at Texas Christian University under head coaches Dennis Franchione and Gary Patterson where he coached NFL legend LaDainian Tomlinson.
Johnson returned to high school coaching in Texas in 2009 as the offensive coordinator at South Grand Prairie. Johnson also served as the director of recruiting.
Johnson would then go on to be the head football Assistant AD at Maypearl  ISD before leaving to become an offensive coordinator and recruiting director at Duncanville ISD and eventually the Athletic Director, Head Football coach at Bonham. 
Johnson took his last team WT White to back-to-back playoffs in 2020 and 2021 to a winning season for the first time in 20 years and was chosen coach of the week in Texas by Dave Campbell’s Texas Football. He was 17-25 in four years at White.
“It’s a school with historic tradition that lately has kind of fallen, but I think it has the potential to be great again,” Johnson said to the Dallas News . “It’s a one-horse town, that excites me. It’s a smaller community, great facilities and it’s everything you think of when you move to Texas, like I did from out of state in 1998. You know about Friday Night Lights. It’s that mind-set.”
The positions became vacant after former Head Coach/Athletic Director Jason Hammett resigned last month. Hammett had held both positions concurrently from 2020 until his resignation earlier this year.
After his resignation, the CCISD board and Superintendent made the decision to split the role into two positions before opening the positions to applicants.
“The board and I discussed this, and we divided those two roles just thinking that we really want the football coach to have an opportunity to focus on the boys side of sports, specifically football, be able to do the things that need to be done there, and really it is - Tony’s well aware- it’s a rebuilding opportunity,” said CCISD Superintendent Joe Burns.
“In the discussions we’ve had with the board, we decided to separate those positions into an AD position and a Head Coach for football,” Burns said.
Jack Welch served as athletic director and head football coach at CCISD for 24 years before before Jack Alvarez took over both positions for two years before leaving for the same position at Cuero where assistant coach Jason Hammett was promoted to the role where he also spent two years at the helm before resigning in January.
For the position of Athletic Director, the district received 34 applications, 32 of which were men and two were women, according to Burns. A committee consisting of trustees Inez Faison and Mike Wilburn, CCISD Director of Music/Head Band Instructor Antonio Chapa, CCHS Principal Dr. Jimmy Shuck and Burns conducted interviews with the top three applicants before recommending Lowery to be the district’s new Athletic Director.
The district received 71 applications for the position of Head Football Coach. The committee, made up of Faison, Wilburn, Chapa, Shuck, Burns and Lowery (as the Girls Athletic Coordinator), interviewed six applicants.
Brittany Fholer contributed to this article.