Editor’s Note: Third in a five-part series profiling Colorado football icons.
Before Andy Lowry built Columbine into one of Colorado’s preeminent big-school football powerhouses — winning five Class 5A state titles and appearing in a sixth last fall — the 56-year-old made his name as a young football coach at his alma mater, Lakewood.
Lowry, who starred at quarterback for the Tigers in the early 1980s before going on to play at Western State, spent two years as Lakewood’s head coach prior to taking the Columbine job in 1994. His Tigers went a surprising 2-0 against Jeffco rival Columbine.
“Truthfully, my claim to fame as a really young coach was that at Lakewood, our numbers were really, really low,” Lowry recalled. “We were kind of the underdogs in everything we did. We ended up beating Columbine in my first year as the head coach on a trick play (faked field goal), and there there’s no way we should’ve beaten them, but we did. Then we beat them again the following year, so that stuck out (to Columbine).”
But the up-and-comer nearly didn’t get the chance to take over at Columbine. In fact, his mentor at Lakewood, George Squires — who gave Lowry his first prep coaching job as the Tigers’ defensive coordinator in 1987 — initially came out of retirement as a coach to take the Columbine job in 1994.
Squires had one official meeting with his team, but after reconsidering the commitment he was taking on, re-retired. Lowry then applied for the re-listed job, and has proceeded to win 257 games with the Rebels.
“I told Columbine to give Andy a look because he was doing such a great job at Lakewood,” said Squires, 78. “They hired him away, and the rest is Colorado football history.”
With an unwavering belief in the full house/wing T formation, an extensive weight lifting program and a faith-heavy, family atmosphere, Lowry built the Rebels into a perennial state title contender, a Jeffco football heavyweight alongside Pomona.
“They never waver from what they do,” said Pomona head coach Jay Madden, who has known Lowry since 1992. “He’s a master of getting kids to buy into his system, and getting that system to basically dominate Colorado high school football. His offense and the option has always been predictable, but it’s often unstoppable. And even though he’s tweaked it over the years, it’s pretty much the same system he’s been running since he was at Lakewood.”
The continuity of Lowry’s staff has also played a part in Columbine’s success. Now entering his 27th year coaching and teaching physical education on Pierce Street, longtime assistants such as defensive coordinator Tom Tonelli, assistant head coach Ivory Moore and head junior varsity coach Lee Andres have been with Lowry since he arrived at Columbine.
That group was pulled even closer together in the wake of the 1999 shooting at the school that left 13 dead and many, seeking someone to blame, pointing fingers at the football program. The Rebels proceeded to win the state title that fall, and the next, seasons that helped the community’s healing process and jump-started the Columbine dynasty that saw the school also win championships in 2002, 2006 and 2011.
“The whole handful of all my longtime assistants would be great head coaches, and could’ve had the possibility of going somewhere to be head coaches,” Lowry said. “But they’ve all stuck together, and that continuity that we’ve had, and the relationship piece and selflessness of it — especially through the tragedy and the impact that had on us — it brought us really close together as a staff, a school and a community.”
Through all the Rebels’ success, the coaching staff has never made a state title a stated goal. And while Lowry acknowledged his coaching genesis was spurred by the desire for a lifelong athlete to stay involved with the sport, his coaching motivations have shifted over time.
“As time goes on, it’s become a vocation for me, and my faith is huge in my life,” Lowry said. “Teaching and coaching is a vocation now, and I pray every day that I can be a role model for kids. (My motivations for coaching) have transitioned from getting that competitive edge to now, that role model piece, and giving back and loving the relationships I build with kids every day.”
And while Lowry’s coaching motivations have become intertwined with the community, his coaching philosophy has also evolved, even if the run-heavy attack he’s favored since his coaching days at Lakewood has not.
“Even as a young coach you could tell then that he really cared around kids,” former Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis said. “I was around coaching back in the day where yellers and screamers motivated people; you had coaches like Woody Hayes, Frank Kush. But Andy was not them… He was more cerebral and thoughtful and emotionally connected with players, even though he was just as demanding as those old-school guys.”
Tonelli describes Lowry as a “father figure” at Columbine, a man whom former players and students keep in touch with decades after they’ve graduated. And, as Tonelli emphasized with two particular anecdotes, Lowry’s coaching style is based off substance, not flash.
Once, at halftime of a playoff game at Mullen in 1996, Lowry attempted to make a point about rising above adversity. He shook a big, glass bottle filled with beans and a ping pong ball, which rose from the bottom of the beans to the top. When the ball completed its rise, Lowry spiked the bottle, shattering glass and scattering beans everywhere. Columbine went out in the second half and lost.
The next fall, prior to a game at Jeffco Stadium against Pomona, Lowry’s message to the team that week was the Rebels were going to “burn down” their rivals’ house. So the coach had Columbine’s shop teacher make a small wood house, and Lowry brought it into the locker room just before kickoff.
“He throws a match on it and it doesn’t light — it fizzles and just goes out,” Tonelli said. “So another assistant pours lighter fluid on it, Andy throws the match and the thing just explodes. All this smoke is billowing out of the locker room as we take the field, screaming… That was probably the last gimmick we ever had, because even though we won that game, we kicked the ball off to them and they returned it 98 yards for a touchdown.
“Those two stories go to show — Andy is not a gimmicky guy. He is who he is, and it doesn’t work when he tries to be something else or tries to be flashy.”
Lowry’s pregame message ahead of Columbine’s upset win over then-defending champion Valor Christian in last year’s semifinal was simpler: “What one man can do, another can do.” The Rebels went out and beat the Eagles on the road, 37-30, and in true Lowry fashion, passed the ball just twice.
“Being a defensive coordinator for Columbine in the early ’90s, playing Andy and Lakewood was always a difficult task,” DeAngelis said. “What they would do is nothing fancy — they’d just line up in the full house, the robust offense, three to four yards a crack at a time. All of a sudden you’d look up, they’ve scored, there’s a ton of time off the clock and then they stop us on offense. Andy really believed in that and he still does.”
As for the future, Lowry maintains he still loves teaching and coaching, and vowed to retire a year too early rather than a year too late. But since retirement doesn’t appear to be on the horizon any time soon, there’s no doubt Columbine will continue to maintain its place among the Class 5A superpowers.
“When you build something that’s very successful, people want to be a part of it,” Madden said. “They’ll move neighborhoods, or they’ll transfer into the school, or they’ll open-enroll into the school… That’s what happens. You build it, they will come. And Andy has built something really special over there.”
