Wylie football fans who want to go back and watch some of the classic football games of the 90s and 2000s can now find those games online.
Former Wylie teacher Bob Patty and Coach Chris Kincaid joined forces to digitize hundreds of Wylie games from about 1988 through the present.
“It was Coach Kincaid’s idea to try to get them online,” Patty said. “Just through brainstorming and technology, we teamed up and did it. There’s been a lot of former players who have gone online and watched them.”
Patty knew a lot about film technology because he used to film the football games for Coach Hugh Sandifer back in the late 90s and early 2000s. He also attributes some of his tech savviness to his own dad.
“My dad was in the Coast Guard for 22 years,” Patty said. “He did public relations. I kind of tagged along and got to watch him take pictures.”
Patty started his career at Wylie as a coach in the 80s, but left for a few years, and returned in 1988 to teach US History and World History. In the late 90s, he began filming the football games for Coach Sandifer and creating tapes that the coaches could use for film study. He did that for about 15 years until he retired from teaching in 2013.
Just a few months after he retired, Patty started to miss teaching. He began substituting and was hired that same year to run Wylie’s DAEP program for students who are suspended.
Patty said he and Kincaid were talking about a specific football game one day and decided to go see if they could find the film of that game.
Kincaid is a former Wylie quarterback, and Patty has two sons who played for the Bulldogs in the early 2000s. One son, Robbie, played in the state championship game in 2000, where Wylie lost in the fourth quarter. His other son, John, played on the state championship team in 2004, where Wylie won in the fourth quarter.
“The conversation evolved into wouldn’t it be neat to see if we could copy all of these,” Patty said. “I told Coach Kincaid, ‘We have a way to do this, but it’s going to be time consuming.’”
Patty, however, was willing to spend the time, and he had the recording equipment necessary to accomplish the task.
“We loaded up a pickup full of all the tapes going back to the 80s,” he said. “We had a pickup full.”
The pickup included VHS tapes, 8mm tapes, film reels and DVDs. Kincaid gave Patty the school’s players for the various types of tapes, and Patty used his own recorders to record them onto DVD. Then from DVD, he converted them to digital.
Unfortunately, most of the games prior to 1987 were on film reels.
“I don’t have anything to be able to convert those at all,” Patty said. “We still have those with no way to convert them.”
Patty estimates that he transferred about 300 games from cassette to DVD and then to a digital format for YouTube. If you go to YouTube and search for Wylie Athletics and then go to the Wylie Athletics Channel, you should be able to click on playlists and see the videos grouped by years. All of the games are available to watch for free.
Patty retired for the second time in May, after eight years of teaching Wylie’s suspended students.
“There were some challenging times,” he said. “There was a reason they were there. I just told them there is no alternative so make the best of it.”
He said this time he plans to stay retired.
“It’s for real this time,” he said. “We will see if it will take.”