This is Part 1 of a two-part episode with Bryan Erwin. Part 1 is the football story — 20 years as one of the winningest high school football coaches in Texas history, two state championships, and the devastating family injuries that led to a career change nobody saw coming. Part 2, coming in a few weeks, is the health and safety story — how Bryan took everything he learned on the sidelines and built an award-winning safety culture in the utility construction industry.
Bryan is the Corporate Health and Safety Officer for Bobcat Power, a leading provider of substation infrastructure services based in Waco, Texas. In March 2025, Bobcat Power was acquired by Asplundh Tree Expert, LLC — one of the largest utility infrastructure companies in the world with approximately 37,000 employees — through its construction subsidiary, Utility Lines Construction Services (ULCS). Under Bryan's leadership, Bobcat Power has been awarded American Electric Power's Contractor Safety Award of the Year in 2020, 2023, and most recently 2025. Having worked closely with AEP since 2009, I can tell you from firsthand experience how difficult that award is to win. Winning it three times is extraordinary.
But before Bryan was a safety leader, he was a football coach. And that story is where everything starts.
I tried to hire Bryan back in 2023 after watching his acceptance speech at the AEP Safety Awards. He stayed at Bobcat Power. Scotty Yocham, Bobcat's founder, stepped up his game and kept him. Good for Scotty, good for Bryan, and good for every person who goes home safe because of the culture Bryan has built.
Bryan Erwin grew up in Hillsboro, Texas — a small town where four Erwin brothers were "pretty feared" in the neighborhood. His dad was a family practice physician who stressed education above all else but also told his sons: do what fuels your passion and go at it with everything you've got. His mom, Martha, was what Bryan calls "the ultimate servant" — a nurse, a cook, and the kind of person who fed everyone who walked through the door.
Sports were everything. Football, baseball, basketball — if there was a season, there was a game in the Irwin front yard. Full contact. The family values were conservative Christian, education-focused, and built on the idea that a well-rounded person needs math, science, history, English, arts, and extracurriculars. One weak link in that chain, Bryan's dad believed, could throw everything off.
Bryan was a quarterback and free safety in high school with the size and speed to play linebacker in college. He'd been recruited by Baylor, Army at West Point, and others. But a series of devastating injuries — torn ACL, multiple knee surgeries, wrist surgeries — ended his playing career during his sophomore, junior, and senior years.
The defining moment came on a yellow bus driving home from Hubbard, Texas after his final injury as a senior in 1987. On that ride, Bryan made the decision: he wasn't going to be a doctor. He was going to be a football coach.
He went home and told his dad. From that day forward, every ounce of energy went toward becoming a coach.
Bryan started at Stephen F. Austin, transferred to the University of Texas, and became a student assistant coach — unpaid, the lowest rung on the totem pole. He then became a graduate assistant, completed a master's program, spent a year at SMU, and began his high school coaching career.
But the story that defines his work ethic happened during his time as a student assistant at Texas. The team was traveling to play Arkansas in 1989. Bryan was on the charter bus, bags loaded, seated and ready. Head Coach David McWilliams tapped him on the shoulder: an alumnus had been added to the travel party. There was no seat on the plane. Bryan was off the trip.
Most people would have gone home angry. Bryan ran to the back of the stadium where the equipment U-Haul van was about to leave. He jumped in the middle of a stick-shift cab between the driver and another staffer, and rode all day and all night to Little Rock to do his job. After the game, the team flew home in two hours. Bryan drove all night again and his future wife picked him up at 4 AM behind the football facility.
As Bryan puts it: "Success in life is not about what happens to you. It's about how you respond to what happens to you." E plus R equals O — Event plus Response equals Outcome. He wanted to be at that game. The U-Haul was the only way. So he took it.
That's delayed gratification. That's perseverance. That's swallowing your pride and doing whatever it takes to get where you want to go — even if it means riding a stick shift for 12 hours while your colleagues fly first class.
Bryan became the youngest head football coach in Texas at 26 when he took the job at Italy High School in 1995. He coached at Italy for three years, moved to his hometown of Hillsboro for four years, and then in 2002 landed the job at Lamarque High School on the Gulf Coast — thanks to his former high school principal, Dr. Adrian Johnson, who had become the superintendent at Lamarque. Johnson got him the interview. Bryan earned the job.
Lamarque was a tradition-rich program in Galveston County — blue-collar families from the petroleum industry with an incredible work ethic that carried over to their kids. The parents backed the coaches 99% of the time, and the athletes were elite.
In 2003, Lamarque won the state championship in double overtime against Denton Ryan. The team had roughly 13 Division I signees, including Rashad Bobino, who went on to start at middle linebacker for the University of Texas and was part of their 2005 national championship team — the legendary Vince Young Rose Bowl game. Bryan attended that game as Rashad's guest when his parents couldn't make the trip.
In 2006, Lamarque won it again, beating Waco High. Two state championships in four years at a program Bryan built from the ground up.
Bryan's coaching philosophy is pure Nick Saban — hard-nosed, disciplined, process-oriented. "The standard is the standard and we're not deviating." He was involved in all three phases of the game, plus strength and conditioning, nutrition, and motivation.
But the philosophy that stuck with me most was this: "It's not about who I'm willing to win with — I'll win with anybody. It's who are you willing to lose with?"
That reframing is brilliant. Every coach, every CEO, every safety leader has to make decisions about who's on the team. If the leading indicators are there that someone is going to cost you a game, a customer, or a life, and you keep them anyway, you can't be surprised when the bill comes due. When you lay your head on the pillow, it's not the wins that haunt you — it's knowing you saw the warning signs and didn't act.
Bryan wrote his thesis at the University of Texas in 1992 arguing that college athletes should be compensated. He was ahead of his time by three decades. His position hasn't changed: these athletes put in full-time hours under enormous pressure on top of being students. They deserve to be paid.
His concern is the transfer portal, not NIL. The lack of loyalty — players jumping from program to program chasing dollars — runs counter to everything Bryan believes. "Loyalty is the most important seven-letter word in the English dictionary," he says. And his definition of loyalty goes beyond not talking badly about someone. It's defending them when they come under attack and they're not in the room.
His proposed fix: one transfer allowed, but you sit out a year. Once you graduate, transfer freely — you've earned that right. That would curb the chaos while still allowing players to find the right fit.
After the 2006 championship, Bryan moved to Flower Mound Marcus — the 5A level (now 6A), the biggest stage in Texas high school football. He coached there for seven years. And then everything changed.
In 2012, both of Bryan's sons tore their ACLs four weeks apart. His oldest was a junior quarterback, his youngest a sophomore who stepped in at QB. The injuries triggered massive PTSD for Bryan, who had lived through the same devastating injuries as a teenager. Walking his sons into surgery twice in four weeks brought back everything.
They came back the next year, bigger, faster, stronger. Then his oldest tore his other ACL and LCL in week two of the season. The pain was, as Bryan describes it, "debilitating." He acknowledges that a torn ACL isn't cancer or combat — but pain is pain, and pain is relevant. What he went through was real.
After that game, Bryan told his dad: "I hate this game." Those words, from a man who had given his entire life to football.
That Thanksgiving, Bryan's brother-in-law Scott Yocham — the founder of Bobcat Power — asked him if he'd ever considered leaving coaching. Bryan said no, he didn't know how to do anything else. Scott told him: "I can teach you the business. I can't teach you what you already know."
In December, Bryan woke up at 3 AM, tapped his wife on the shoulder, and said: "I'm going to resign today. Let's do this."
Before we close Part 1, our conversation turned to one of the most critical issues facing the utility construction industry: mental health and suicide.
The statistics are staggering. Construction workers die by suicide at five times the rate they die from on-the-job incidents. Five times. More than electrical contact, falls, struck-by, and caught-between combined. The isolation of living on the road, weeks away from family, chronic physical pain masked by opioids that spiral into substance abuse, the stress of dangerous work in brutal elements — it all compounds.
Bryan has been developing a program called "Tougher Than Nails" — a spiritual-based approach to suicide prevention in the construction industry. His conviction is that current approaches — call 988, download this app, bring in a speaker — aren't working. The numbers keep climbing. He believes the answer lies in going to our Creator, and he's willing to be the one with the courage to take that approach even if it's unconventional.
This topic deserves its own dedicated episode, and we're planning to bring Bryan back alongside RL and others for a panel discussion. The men and women who build and maintain our nation's infrastructure are heroes. They deserve better support than they're getting.
Part 2 — how Bryan built an award-winning health and safety culture at Bobcat Power using everything he learned on the football field — is coming soon.
Listen to the full episode on From Boots to Boardroom.
From Boots to Boardroom is presented by KYRO AI — Digitize work and maximize profits.
This is Part 1 of a two-part episode with Bryan Erwin. Part 1 is the football story — 20 years as one of the winningest high school football coaches in Texas history, two state championships, and the devastating family injuries that led to a career change nobody saw coming. Part 2, coming in a few weeks, is the health and safety story — how Bryan took everything he learned on the sidelines and built an award-winning safety culture in the utility construction industry.
Bryan is the Corporate Health and Safety Officer for Bobcat Power, a leading provider of substation infrastructure services based in Waco, Texas. In March 2025, Bobcat Power was acquired by Asplundh Tree Expert, LLC — one of the largest utility infrastructure companies in the world with approximately 37,000 employees — through its construction subsidiary, Utility Lines Construction Services (ULCS). Under Bryan's leadership, Bobcat Power has been awarded American Electric Power's Contractor Safety Award of the Year in 2020, 2023, and most recently 2025. Having worked closely with AEP since 2009, I can tell you from firsthand experience how difficult that award is to win. Winning it three times is extraordinary.
But before Bryan was a safety leader, he was a football coach. And that story is where everything starts.
I tried to hire Bryan back in 2023 after watching his acceptance speech at the AEP Safety Awards. He stayed at Bobcat Power. Scotty Yocham, Bobcat's founder, stepped up his game and kept him. Good for Scotty, good for Bryan, and good for every person who goes home safe because of the culture Bryan has built.
Bryan Erwin grew up in Hillsboro, Texas — a small town where four Erwin brothers were "pretty feared" in the neighborhood. His dad was a family practice physician who stressed education above all else but also told his sons: do what fuels your passion and go at it with everything you've got. His mom, Martha, was what Bryan calls "the ultimate servant" — a nurse, a cook, and the kind of person who fed everyone who walked through the door.
Sports were everything. Football, baseball, basketball — if there was a season, there was a game in the Irwin front yard. Full contact. The family values were conservative Christian, education-focused, and built on the idea that a well-rounded person needs math, science, history, English, arts, and extracurriculars. One weak link in that chain, Bryan's dad believed, could throw everything off.
Bryan was a quarterback and free safety in high school with the size and speed to play linebacker in college. He'd been recruited by Baylor, Army at West Point, and others. But a series of devastating injuries — torn ACL, multiple knee surgeries, wrist surgeries — ended his playing career during his sophomore, junior, and senior years.
The defining moment came on a yellow bus driving home from Hubbard, Texas after his final injury as a senior in 1987. On that ride, Bryan made the decision: he wasn't going to be a doctor. He was going to be a football coach.
He went home and told his dad. From that day forward, every ounce of energy went toward becoming a coach.
Bryan started at Stephen F. Austin, transferred to the University of Texas, and became a student assistant coach — unpaid, the lowest rung on the totem pole. He then became a graduate assistant, completed a master's program, spent a year at SMU, and began his high school coaching career.
But the story that defines his work ethic happened during his time as a student assistant at Texas. The team was traveling to play Arkansas in 1989. Bryan was on the charter bus, bags loaded, seated and ready. Head Coach David McWilliams tapped him on the shoulder: an alumnus had been added to the travel party. There was no seat on the plane. Bryan was off the trip.
Most people would have gone home angry. Bryan ran to the back of the stadium where the equipment U-Haul van was about to leave. He jumped in the middle of a stick-shift cab between the driver and another staffer, and rode all day and all night to Little Rock to do his job. After the game, the team flew home in two hours. Bryan drove all night again and his future wife picked him up at 4 AM behind the football facility.
As Bryan puts it: "Success in life is not about what happens to you. It's about how you respond to what happens to you." E plus R equals O — Event plus Response equals Outcome. He wanted to be at that game. The U-Haul was the only way. So he took it.
That's delayed gratification. That's perseverance. That's swallowing your pride and doing whatever it takes to get where you want to go — even if it means riding a stick shift for 12 hours while your colleagues fly first class.
Bryan became the youngest head football coach in Texas at 26 when he took the job at Italy High School in 1995. He coached at Italy for three years, moved to his hometown of Hillsboro for four years, and then in 2002 landed the job at Lamarque High School on the Gulf Coast — thanks to his former high school principal, Dr. Adrian Johnson, who had become the superintendent at Lamarque. Johnson got him the interview. Bryan earned the job.
Lamarque was a tradition-rich program in Galveston County — blue-collar families from the petroleum industry with an incredible work ethic that carried over to their kids. The parents backed the coaches 99% of the time, and the athletes were elite.
In 2003, Lamarque won the state championship in double overtime against Denton Ryan. The team had roughly 13 Division I signees, including Rashad Bobino, who went on to start at middle linebacker for the University of Texas and was part of their 2005 national championship team — the legendary Vince Young Rose Bowl game. Bryan attended that game as Rashad's guest when his parents couldn't make the trip.
In 2006, Lamarque won it again, beating Waco High. Two state championships in four years at a program Bryan built from the ground up.
Bryan's coaching philosophy is pure Nick Saban — hard-nosed, disciplined, process-oriented. "The standard is the standard and we're not deviating." He was involved in all three phases of the game, plus strength and conditioning, nutrition, and motivation.
But the philosophy that stuck with me most was this: "It's not about who I'm willing to win with — I'll win with anybody. It's who are you willing to lose with?"
That reframing is brilliant. Every coach, every CEO, every safety leader has to make decisions about who's on the team. If the leading indicators are there that someone is going to cost you a game, a customer, or a life, and you keep them anyway, you can't be surprised when the bill comes due. When you lay your head on the pillow, it's not the wins that haunt you — it's knowing you saw the warning signs and didn't act.
Bryan wrote his thesis at the University of Texas in 1992 arguing that college athletes should be compensated. He was ahead of his time by three decades. His position hasn't changed: these athletes put in full-time hours under enormous pressure on top of being students. They deserve to be paid.
His concern is the transfer portal, not NIL. The lack of loyalty — players jumping from program to program chasing dollars — runs counter to everything Bryan believes. "Loyalty is the most important seven-letter word in the English dictionary," he says. And his definition of loyalty goes beyond not talking badly about someone. It's defending them when they come under attack and they're not in the room.
His proposed fix: one transfer allowed, but you sit out a year. Once you graduate, transfer freely — you've earned that right. That would curb the chaos while still allowing players to find the right fit.
After the 2006 championship, Bryan moved to Flower Mound Marcus — the 5A level (now 6A), the biggest stage in Texas high school football. He coached there for seven years. And then everything changed.
In 2012, both of Bryan's sons tore their ACLs four weeks apart. His oldest was a junior quarterback, his youngest a sophomore who stepped in at QB. The injuries triggered massive PTSD for Bryan, who had lived through the same devastating injuries as a teenager. Walking his sons into surgery twice in four weeks brought back everything.
They came back the next year, bigger, faster, stronger. Then his oldest tore his other ACL and LCL in week two of the season. The pain was, as Bryan describes it, "debilitating." He acknowledges that a torn ACL isn't cancer or combat — but pain is pain, and pain is relevant. What he went through was real.
After that game, Bryan told his dad: "I hate this game." Those words, from a man who had given his entire life to football.
That Thanksgiving, Bryan's brother-in-law Scott Yocham — the founder of Bobcat Power — asked him if he'd ever considered leaving coaching. Bryan said no, he didn't know how to do anything else. Scott told him: "I can teach you the business. I can't teach you what you already know."
In December, Bryan woke up at 3 AM, tapped his wife on the shoulder, and said: "I'm going to resign today. Let's do this."
Before we close Part 1, our conversation turned to one of the most critical issues facing the utility construction industry: mental health and suicide.
The statistics are staggering. Construction workers die by suicide at five times the rate they die from on-the-job incidents. Five times. More than electrical contact, falls, struck-by, and caught-between combined. The isolation of living on the road, weeks away from family, chronic physical pain masked by opioids that spiral into substance abuse, the stress of dangerous work in brutal elements — it all compounds.
Bryan has been developing a program called "Tougher Than Nails" — a spiritual-based approach to suicide prevention in the construction industry. His conviction is that current approaches — call 988, download this app, bring in a speaker — aren't working. The numbers keep climbing. He believes the answer lies in going to our Creator, and he's willing to be the one with the courage to take that approach even if it's unconventional.
This topic deserves its own dedicated episode, and we're planning to bring Bryan back alongside RL and others for a panel discussion. The men and women who build and maintain our nation's infrastructure are heroes. They deserve better support than they're getting.
Part 2 — how Bryan built an award-winning health and safety culture at Bobcat Power using everything he learned on the football field — is coming soon.
Listen to the full episode on From Boots to Boardroom.
From Boots to Boardroom is presented by KYRO AI — Digitize work and maximize profits.
Hari Vasudevan, PE, is a serial entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI-driven solutions for utilities, construction, and storm response. As Founder and CEO of KYRO AI, he leads the development of AI-powered software that helps utility, vegetation, and field service teams digitize operations, improve storm response and restoration, and reduce operational risk. He also serves as Vice Chair and Strategic Advisor for the Edison Electric Institute’s Transmission Subject Area Committee and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering with professional engineering licensure in multiple states.
