It was bedtime in the Haack household. But when Leslie walked into her 5-year-old son’s room and saw him sitting at a play school desk, she paused, backed out and hollered at her husband to come see this. They stood peering around the door at Brooks, his back turned to them, hunched over a piece of paper, furiously scribbling.

Brooks was drawing Xs and Os. He’d started flag football that year. 

So, does that answer your question on if they always knew Houston Memorial’s new head coach, Brooks Haack, would grow up to be a football coach?

“I don’t even know if Brooks had a choice to do anything else,” mom said. “We’ve always been in education or coaching.”

His father, Kalum, coached Katy High School’s softball team for 26 years and won two state championships. Leslie started Katy Cinco Ranch’s softball program when the school opened in 1999 before moving into administration. She’s now the deputy superintendent of Katy ISD.

Husband and wife decided they were too competitive to both be coaches. When Katy played Cinco Ranch in Spring 2001, Brooks sat with a Katy T-Shirt in his father’s dugout while his older sister, Matte, sat in mom’s dugout with a Cinco Ranch T-shirt. After the umpire called ballgame, giving Katy a 10-0 victory, Leslie turned into her now empty dugout, whipped her head around, and saw Matte had snuck over to the winning side.

But Leslie didn’t give up the whistle entirely once she moved to the administrative side. Whenever one of Kalum’s softball games conflicted with coaching Brooks’ “Haack Attack” youth baseball team, Leslie would substitute coach.

“She got on us harder than any other coaches,” Brooks said. “My buddies would always be like, ‘Hey, is your mom coaching today or is it your dad?’ And if it was my mom, they’d say, ‘If we don’t run rule this team, we’re going to have to run and condition after the game.’”

Brooks dressed as a coach every Halloween, mimicking his father by carrying a clipboard and kicking dirt down the third base line when a batter missed the bunt sign. As an actual coach, however, he’s a blend of both his parents. Every now and then, that competitive fire flares.

“When we start spring ball, I’m going to throw against our defense in 7-on-7 and talk mess to them like, ‘Hey, this is what it’s gonna take,’” said Brooks, who takes over a Mustangs program that 4-7 in 2024. “I’m not all-world or anything like that, but I like to get out there and still mix it up with the kids.”

That will be a new energy for the Memorial football program. Haack takes over for the now-retired Gary Koch, who held the head job at Memorial since 1992, the year before Haack was born.

Haack still has the athleticism that propelled him to a 27-3 record as Katy’s starting quarterback and later a Division I scholarship, and he’ll remind the kids of it if they need an example of how to do the matt drills or a power clean properly.

Just because he’s a new face doesn’t mean he’s unfamiliar with the program, however. Haack played at Katy before most of the school district’s high schools opened, which put them in a district with Memorial. He competed against Memorial’s District Offensive MVP quarterback, Wayne Taylor, and future Division I baseball player Boomer White. He saw Memorial from a 30,000-foot view in high school and then fell in love with the area as an adult visiting his now-wife when she lived in the city center.

Plenty of people would shy away from stepping into the shoes of a legendary figure like Koch, but Haack is fresh off helping accomplish what many thought was impossible as the offensive coordinator at Richmond Randle. The Lions won the Class 5A Division II State Championship over South Oak Cliff, a program that had been to more consecutive state championships (four) than years Randle was a varsity program (three). The Randle coaching staff began their tenure lifting the weight room equipment off 18-wheelers and capped it last season lifting the state championship trophy.

“All those hours we put in that summer to get self-set up and be able to build it into what we were able to do last year, it was an unreal feeling,” Haack said. “You win a state championship, and it bonds people for life, because we all knew what it took to get it to the place where we were.”

Haack has already experienced his first coaching moment at Memorial; he filled in for the softball team as the first base coach for the past two games. Yes, softball is in his family, but the willingness to step up for a different sport comes from Randle head coach Brian Randle. After the Lions went three rounds deep in the playoffs in 2023, Randle stepped in as the girls’ basketball assistant coach because the team was short a coach.

He didn’t just fill in as an extra body, either. The team made it all the way to the state tournament, and Randle was so active on the sidelines the actual head coach had to remind him he wasn’t the head coach on the basketball court. 

“There are so many things about Coach Randle that I hope I can be a fraction as good of,” Haack said.

He’ll get his chance in 2025.