Riley Dodge and Todd Dodge will meet again on the football field, but this time as rivals. Southlake Carroll is set to play Austin Westlake, Todd Dodge's team, at AT&T Stadium on Aug. 28 at 5 p.m.
“It’s been in the process for close to a year now,” Steve Keasler, CISD’s athletic director, says. “The UIL director, athletic director and I — it’s their 100th year of football celebration next year, and so they’ve been working on trying to obviously do a special event...and so we’ve been working with them on that.”
Todd and Riley Dodge are both from Southlake Carroll. Todd coached the team between 2002 and 2006, and Riley was the quarterback for the team between 2005 and 2007. Now, they share the title of head coach — Todd Dodge joined Austin Westlake in 2014 while Riley came home to Southlake Carroll in 2018.
“It was tough on the Dodge family,” Steve says. “I don’t know that they really wanted to do that. There’s not really a winner for them in terms of a personal family — for their family, but we talked it over with both of them, and both of them agreed with me that this was a really good deal for high school football.”
Steve says the Dodges understood that it was good promotion for both their teams and programs.
“It was never really about them, and so I appreciated them putting their personal thoughts [aside] for the betterment of, I think the state of Texas, as well as high school football,” Steve says.
The Dodges agreed to play against each other for one time only — unless they get matched up during the playoffs, Steve says.
“I don’t know that this has ever happened before where the father plays the son, and I don’t know that I can say that I’ve ever heard of it,” Steve says. “It should be very exciting.”
This game will be even more exciting for Carroll because of Todd’s history with the team, Steve says.
“He’s still connected to a lot of our Dragon fans, and he’s highly respected,” Steve says. “And then, of course, Riley is doing an amazing job and we’re extremely proud of him as well.”
During his time as head coach, Todd amassed a 98-11 overall record and was named national coach of the year twice.
Current head coach Riley led the Dragons to a 13-1 record during the 2019 season, and received the Landry Award’s Coach of the Year in 2019.
“I think [fans] will be excited to see father vs. son in two very established programs… I think it’s just a really cool story, to be quite honest,” Steve says. “And so we’re excited about that to kickoff the year. And at the end of the day, our ultimate goal is to start at AT&T and then finish at AT&T.”
Fans can expect ticket information for the game to be released sometime around the end of the school year.