Allegations Against Legendary Football Coach’s Son Fracture Texas Town

By Lomi Kriel, The Texas Tribune

CELINA, TX – Sasha Follett and her 14-year-old daughter shivered beneath the North Texas stadium lights, but the brisk temperatures did not chill the fervor for their beloved Celina Bobcats. At an away game before Thanksgiving, Celina High School fans packed the stands in the team’s trademark orange, dominating the far smaller opposing crowd from Fort Worth.

The top-ranked Celina football team is barrelling toward another state championship this month. If they win, it would be the Bobcats’ 10th state title ever and its second in a row since Bill Elliott was named the district’s athletic director and head high school football coach.

But as Elliott’s assistants expertly called plays, the man at the core of the team was noticeably missing. Despite impassioned pleas by his players, the top coach was barred from the field. Known for being demanding but supportive, Elliott is the kind of father figure parents call when their boys need a stern rebuke and who makes athletes pray before games. Orange-painted hay bales in the Bobcats’ honor dot the drive to the splashy $25 million-dollar high school stadium, built partly at Elliott’s urging. On Friday nights, downtown restaurants regularly broadcast Bobcats’ games.

Once regarded as a local hero, Elliott now is at the center of a growing scandal that has roiled this city and drawn unusual attention from politicians and state agencies. This fall, police arrested the head coach’s 26-year-old son Caleb, a middle school teacher and assistant football coach. Students reported to their parents that Caleb Elliott forced them to perform naked jumping jacks and burpees while videotaping them on his phone, according to an arrest affidavit and civil lawsuits. He now stands accused of secretly filming boys in the school’s locker room and possessing child pornography.

He has since resigned, surrendered his teaching license and remains in Collin County jail on state and federal charges.

While his father is not facing criminal accusations, at least four civil lawsuits allege that he and other school officials ignored and covered up a pattern of Elliott’s concerning behavior that lawyers and families said should have spurred earlier intervention. The father and son declined to comment through their shared attorney who disputes the allegations against them.

“There’s a lot of things that will come full tilt once the truth and all the perspectives come out,” said Gregg M. Gibbs, a former Plano police officer and longtime neighbor of the Elliotts who acknowledged that the allegations on their face appear “horrible.” But Gibbs noted that they were based on “a ton of misinformation,” declining to offer specifics.

The case is the first test of a new state law passed this year that allows families to sue school districts during sexual abuse allegations in which educators are accused of negligence. Government entities are typically shielded from most civil litigation. State Rep. Mitch Little, a Republican who represents parts of North Texas neighboring Celina as well as victims in this civil litigation, said at a press conference outside Collin County’s courthouse this month that the public should know whether the school district “grossly, negligently or recklessly continued employing or failing to supervise Caleb Elliott in a way that caused harm to these children. Because ultimately, the children's lives and these families’ lives are what's at stake.”

The furor has dampened the Bobcats steady march to victory even as Follett and her daughter joined the crowd in Bedford in praise of another touchdown. The single mother lamented the all-consuming outrage that has marred their beloved team’s winning streak.

“You don’t think something like this will happen here,” said the 45-year-old Navy veteran about the allegations. Follett moved to Celina five years ago from San Antonio, seeking the small-town feel and traditional values that have drawn thousands to the city 50 miles north of Dallas, whose population has more than quadrupled since 2019 to a projected 67,232 next year. That influx of people moving into neighborhoods rapidly rising in the northwestern corner of Collin County has brought newfound scrutiny to a staunchly Biblebelt community that, until recently, sat beyond the sprawling suburbanization of North Texas’ former farm towns. In an unusual division for these typically close knit residents, the Elliott controversy has pitted football against family values and lodged longtime locals against newcomers.

While Follett acknowledged that the accusations against Caleb Elliott are deeply troubling, she added however, “I don’t know that his dad should be blamed.” Among the reasons she said she steadfastly supports the head coach is his tireless passion for student athletes like her sophomore daughter whom he routinely rooted for at track meets.

Like her, many in this city back the elder Elliott. Nearly 900 residents signed a petition to allow him to attend a Halloween senior night celebration, permission which the school district did not grant. The coach, the petition said, “has been instrumental in the development of these seniors throughout their high school careers and even prior, for many going back to pee wee tackle football.” In response, more than 260 people authored a counter petition saying that allowing the coach to attend the event would “be deeply painful and disrespectful to those families and to every parent who believes schools should always put students’ safety first.”

The district has placed Bill Elliott and the middle school principal on leave pending an independent investigation, the head of which did not respond to questions. The district separately faces a Texas Education Agency inquiry, results of which police said should be completed this month. A spokesperson for the state agency said that its inquiry is ongoing. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who hails from the more established nearby suburb of McKinney also launched an investigation, although a spokesperson did not respond to questions about where that stands.

Celina’s mayor, a spokesperson for the school district, the head of its school board and his deputy, the high school’s principal and acting athletic director, its assistant football coaches, its middle school principal, leaders of its athletic booster clubs, and more than a dozen parents of varsity Bobcat football players and the team’s alumni also did not respond or declined comment.

Attorneys involved say the lack of perceived public accountability sends an uncomfortable message about what the city values and whom it seeks to protect.

“The community faces a choice: Do you excuse sexual exploitation of young children in the name of preserving your ability to go and get another darned football state championship?” asked Quentin Brogdon, a former prosecutor who filed civil suits in the matter. “Of course not. You draw a line in the sand. You say ‘Sorry, we may have to lose the football championship to put away the predator and to protect our children.’”

"Foreseeable risk"

Like his father, Caleb Elliott professes a love of football and God. “Football = life,” he wrote on his Instagram, identifying as a Christian and Bobcat. In his bio he appeared to quote a Texas commander at the Alamo who once famously uttered: “I will not surrender, I will not retreat.”

He reportedly attended the University of North Texas, returning to Celina where his father had built a dynasty that included hiring his elder son Nathan as an assistant high school football coach. Several other Elliott relatives are also employed by the school district, parents and attorneys said.

Caleb Elliott gained employment as a substitute teacher at Celina’s high school, said Gibbs, the family attorney. There, he helped his father as an assistant football coach, according to families. Newspaper accounts glowingly characterized the family’s football tenure. Elliott’s attorney maintained that the youngest Elliott’s coaching role at the high school was unofficial.

During his time at the high school, civil lawsuits allege that Caleb Elliott began a relationship with a male student and some district officials were made aware. Gibbs, who also represents that former student, said that the relationship began only after the student graduated and when he was 19. The attorney disputed allegations of wrongdoing while Elliott was at the high school, saying that the couple met online while the teen briefly lived in Mississippi. The Tribune is not naming the former student, who declined comment when reached on his cell, because he is potentially a victim. The teen later returned to Celina, beginning a relationship with Elliott and moving in with him, his attorney said.

The school district declined to clarify the younger Elliott or his partner’s employment, and did not respond to detailed questions.

According to TEA records, the younger Elliott obtained a permanent teaching position at Celina’s middle school in 2024, where he also was an assistant receivers football coach. At some point, the school district hired Elliot’s partner as a special education teaching assistant, according to lawyers and parents. It is unclear whether that was a substitute or permanent role as the district declined to say. Elliott’s attorney said that the family knew he was dating the ex-student because the couple came out on social media.

In the spring of 2024, lawsuits allege that some students noticed disturbing behavior by Elliott, including that he installed hidden video cameras in locker rooms. The lawsuits claim that district officials were informed, but did not bar Elliott from contact with the boys he oversaw. They also did not enforce his alleged ban from locker rooms, although officials sent a letter to some parents acknowledging the incident, the lawsuits allege. The police chief said at a press conference that his officers could not obtain that notice and asked parents to share it. The district declined to confirm whether it sent it.

The plaintiffs in their lawsuits allege that the district knew Elliott was gay and that knowledge in addition to his “history of an inappropriate relationship with a male student, and his unsupervised access to vulnerable young boys in intimate settings, created an obvious and foreseeable risk.” The most recent filing said at least one middle school teacher reported that Elliott was “behaving inappropriately towards children,” but the district “disregarded, minimized and ignored the report.”

Elliott’s arrest, which the police department posted on Facebook as his father oversaw an important Friday night game, rippled across the tight knit community.

“Complete disbelief,” is how Lori Wallace, a 46-year-old homemaker whose sons grew up playing neighborhood football with Caleb and his brother, put it. “It was a shock to a lot of people that it was Coach Elliott's son because he very much leans on the conservative side.”

The police department seized the younger Elliott’s phone, on which its chief said officers found “more than 10 images, but less than 50 images that meet the definition of child pornography” involving students. In a packed, emotional school board meeting weeks later, his father publicly addressed the scandal.

"I want you to know how sorry I am, and my family is," Bill Elliott said, his voice breaking. "I understand your anger. I understand your frustration. I get it — it's horrible.”

He added, “I will do all I can to make sure that justice prevails and things are done right.”

Gibbs, the family’s attorney, said the Elliotts urge people not to rush to judgment before all proceedings are complete.

That the district placed the father on leave, the lawyer said, is “not because there's any substantive proof of any wrongdoing on his part, but because he is a very influential character in that community and related to someone accused of such horrific allegations.”

Police investigation questioned

At the press conference in late November, Celina’s Police Chief John Cullison said that his officers had identified more than three dozen victims in the Caleb Elliott case. Yet he said that his officers had so far found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by school officials, including by Elliott’s father.

Cullison, who declined repeated interview requests, noted that the younger Elliott’s partner refused to talk to law enforcement. That complicated the department’s investigation. Elliott’s attorney said that the teen submitted a sworn statement.

In his press conference, Cullison seemed to suggest that civil litigation might prove more fruitful in concluding broader culpability in this case.

“New evidence may sometimes arise during civil investigations that only emerges after witnesses are placed under oath,” the chief said. If so, he said more charges could be filed.

Attorneys for the victims said that police closed its investigation so hurriedly raised red flags about the seriousness of the inquiry.

The department, for example, could not have obtained responses from national technology companies about the younger Elliott’s online activity in less than two months, said Brogdon, one of the civil lawyers.

He said that officers told parents of one victim he represents that they still hadn’t received much of that documentation a day before police announced no broader evidence of wrongdoing. The department declined to address such accusations. A police spokesperson said that it could not respond to detailed questions because of what he called an ongoing investigation despite the chief’s suggestions last month that the criminal inquiry was complete. 

“Why did they need to close the investigation so rapidly,” asked Brogdon, characterizing local law enforcement’s handling of the matter as an attempt to say, "please stop calling us now. We're putting it on the doorstep of civil lawyers.”

Brogdon’s latest lawsuit seeks more than $1 million in damages from the Celina school district.

In response to such claims, Celina’s police chief on Facebook asked civil attorneys to submit any new evidence they have found.

“I want to be very clear that if anyone is going to allege that they have evidence and witnesses related to a criminal case involving children in our community, they have a duty to present that information to law enforcement,” Cullison said.

Elliott’s attorney maintained that civil lawyers rushed to file cases based on allegations that he claimed, “they hadn’t even begun to corroborate.”

“They took what people were saying and ran with it,” Gibbs said. “Now they've got such a narrative that they're trying to make it fit, you know, a square peg in a round hole, and it doesn't work.”

"Crisis in our school system"

The passage of the new law allowing litigation against school districts, filed by Little, was an unusual departure for Republicans in the state who for decades have made it increasingly hard to win civil suits. That effort, which has included imposing drastically lower caps on financial damages that can be obtained by plaintiffs, was necessary to prevent frivolous lawsuits, its proponents have argued.

Little, in laying out his bill this spring, argued that this limited exception was necessary even though his colleagues have refused to extend similar carve outs for most litigation against local governments.

That’s true even in the case of victims of school shootings like in Uvalde, where a teen gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022. Two school district officers face child endangerment charges for their role in the botched response, regarded as one of the worst in the nation. In 2023, a state senate proposal to curtail government protections from civil lawsuits stalled in committee without receiving a hearing.

In Little’s testimony this year, the Republican said that his legislation “allows the judicial system to be a check and balance on a school system that is really not subject to many checks.”

Little declined to answer whether he supports broader civil exemptions in other allegations of abuse or negligence at schools. He said that he stood by his remarks characterizing sexual abuse in the state is a “crisis in our school system,”

“To what extent,” Little questioned in that testimony before his House colleagues, “are we willing to allow our children in the state of Texas to attend school and undergo the risk of being either groomed or harmed by a teacher sexually?”

He added that the state is at a “brink in our school system where traditional values that we have espoused as a country and as a state are less front and center. I'm not saying that those things create predators. I'm saying that those environments sometimes allow them to thrive.”

The state’s education agency could not immediately provide data on how many such accusations have been lobbed against district employees. But Tami Brown Rodriguez, an Arlington-based advocate against sexual trafficking who said that she has represented victims in 20 states, testified that more than 56,000 complaints of educator misconduct have been filed against the state’s public school districts in recent years. Of those, she said nearly 6,900 involved sexual or violent offenses ranging from harassment and grooming to abuse.

“These are not isolated incidents,” she testified. “They are systemic failures.”

No one publicly opposed Little’s bill before the state House committee, although a handful registered against it. In submitted comments, some Texans voiced concerns that taxpayers would foot the bill for crimes in which an alleged predator and possible failures by school officials, not the public, is to blame.

Ross Garrison, a director of digital learning in the Denton Independent School District, echoed such worries in his testimony.

“Should a law-abiding community really have to pay the legal bills of an individual that made a horrible choice on their own?” he asked.

"Time to heal"

Jonathan Granger, a 42-year-old sales executive, cheered as the Bobcats racked up another victory against the Forth Wort Eastern Hills Highlanders in November. As the Bobcats clinched the win with a final score of 70-22, Granger called out to his seventh-grader, a ball boy on the sidelines, while reflecting on the crisis fraying the community.

Despite once being a fan of the elder Elliott, Granger said that now he thought it best for the district to remove him, regardless of whether the head coach is guilty of wrongdoing.

“Give the community time to heal,” Granger said. “I don't think that the tradition and the importance of football in Celina is going to go away with the exit of Coach Elliott.”

His son played football under the younger Elliott at the middle school, forcing tense conversations in light of the accusations. Granger’s 13-year-old doesn’t grasp the “scope of how depraved it is,” the father said.

Attorneys for the victims said that those families declined requests for interviews as they and their children feel fear community backlash.

As officials called the game in Celina’s favor, Granger’s son rushed to tell his father that the Highlanders wanted to fight. Such risk of violence prompted local officials to abruptly halt the traditional shaking of hands between teams after parents said that at least one Fort Worth player gestured in the motion of a gun, allegedly threatening that he would see the Bobcats in the parking lot.

Critics rushed to post disparaging comments against the Bobcats on one of Celina’s most popular Facebook pages, an unsettling development residents say has become unfortunately common in the wake of the Elliott scandal.

“Cover up for pedos and can’t have sportsmanship,” one poster alleged.

Granger said that while he philosophically supports the ability of parents to sue schools in sexual abuse cases, he likewise worried about the financial impact on residents as a result of local officials’ apparent failures.

“Why are we having to pay?” he asked.

More opportunities for division and celebration lie ahead. At a school board meeting on Dec. 15, parents are expected to demand more accountability from the district. Meanwhile the Bobcats face the formidable Stephenville Yellow Jackets in the much anticipated state semi-finals Friday in Fort Worth. If they win, they head to the state championship on Dec. 19.

Amidst the fallout, Bobcats and their fans suffer. Among the latest pains parents cited was the district’s barring of the elder Elliott from graduating seniors’ college signing day this month. Their top coach’s absence devastated players, according to parents. That included the star quarterback committed to the top 10-ranked football powerhouse of the University of Oklahoma. Bowe Bentley, whose father did not respond to a text, has played under the elder Elliott since seventh grade.

Kyle Sims, a 60-year-old retiree and former high school football player whose grandchildren are in the Celina school district where his wife also works, urged the city’s residents to reflect on its stated values and halt its fealty to the flagship sport.

“I don’t give a rat's ass about football when it comes to protecting children's safety,” Sims said.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.