Ray Gates wasn’t expecting much out of his first interview for a high school football head-coaching job five years ago. The former Tarleton State defensive lineman, then in his mid-thirties, simply wanted to experience the process. The folks at North Dallas High, coming off a 2–7 finish in 2018, thanked the Cedar Hill assistant for coming in and turned elsewhere for their next coach.Not long after that, Gates was granted a virtual interview at Dallas’s Carter High, but the school didn’t ask him back for an in-person follow-up. At Richardson’s Berkner High in 2021, Gates participated in multiple interview rounds with the Metroplex school, but he again lost out on the job to another coach.In the spring of 2022, Gates was confident he’d landed the…