The 71-year-old Bartlett wanted to do her part in rejuvenating the nearly empty downtown, whose red-brick streets and early 20th-century architecture draws a handful of tourists on the weekends.
“I opened this, really, to put another business in town,” she said on recent weekday afternoon as a handful of customers ate lunch or a $1 Bluebell ice-cream cone. “It's good some days and other days, it's very slow. We'll probably rearrange some of our hours to accommodate people at the football game when school gets going. But we're going to stick with it, because we figure it's going to get better.”
That type of attitude pervades the fieldhouse at Bartlett High School on the other side of this cotton-farming town that straddles the line of Williamson and Bell counties. The proud program — Bartlett won three state titles in the 1990s – has struggled in recent years on the field and with enrollment; the Bulldogs have won just four games over the past three seasons, and the student population has dropped from 125 in 2012 to its current UIL number of 94 students.
Bartlett is the smallest school in the Austin area and became eligible to play six-man football this past realignment. However, the program's players and coaches have no interest in a game that senior Roy Degollado says “isn't real football.”
“I've heard of it, but I thought it was something you play on the playground,” said Degollado, a four-year starter at linebacker and on the offensive line whose father and cousins played for the powerhouse Bartlett squads in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Second-year coach Drew Bridges, a 31-year-old who has already worked in schools ranging from his small hometown of Ganado to Class 6A's Katy Mayde Creek, shares his captain's opinion.
“I wouldn't have come here if they were going to play six-man,” he said. “The community here supports 11-man. Now, we know the challenges that comes with that, but I believe that we're starting to put some things in place that will allow us to compete and be successful. There's a lot of schools in our state that play 11-man with our numbers and do well.”
Bridges has already taken significant steps toward such success. In a school with less than 50 boys, almost 40 participate in the football program. Bridges re-established a junior varsity team last season after Bartlett went years with just a varsity squad, and he says that experience helped the varsity last season when a few injuries cut into the Bartlett lineup.
“Right after that first (JV) game, boy, they were excited,” he said. “They had so much fun. And they played the whole time. And then some came up (to varsity) and helped us, and they wouldn't have been ready for that f they didn't have that JV experience.”
Growth in the school as well as the town may soon creep up as more and more people that work in Austin seek affordable housing. Taylor, 16 miles south of Bartlett, has had its high-school enrollment grow from 882 in 2012 to its current UIL number of 1,024. Just 12 miles west of Bartlett, Jarrell High School' student population has almost doubled over the past 10 years.
“We've gotten smaller, but the corridor is pushing out this way,” Sandobal said. “And I hope people start taking an interest in these (downtown) buildings and fixing them up. It wouldn't be that difficult for the town to come alive again.”
