He didn’t just mean the flight. While Crawley was in the air, a sea of Wheatland Pirates rushed the tarmac to surprise him when he landed. Out of three yellow school buses, the Wheatland High School men and women’s football teams rolled out to join Crawley’s family and greet their coach.
Crawley served active duty in the U.S. Air Force for 7 years and now serves in the reserves as a technical sergeant with the 940th Air Refueling Wing (ARW). He got close to taking a ride in a fast jet while, working in avionics on the F-16, and was stationed in multiple places including Guam, Japan and South Korea. Raised in a military family, he moved around a lot. When asked where home was, he said, “I claim here,” and that “Wheatland is definitely home for me and my family.”
Those diverse experiences with the Air Force influenced Crawley as a teacher and a coach and, “helped [him] communicate with different groups of students.” When asked if there was much similarity between the training he received in the Air Force and the skills he teaches on the football field, he acknowledges the differences but that “definitely the resilience and mental aspect overlaps.”
His students echoed this theme of resiliency. Tenth-grader Jaeda Wolfe, after participating in a door-breeching demonstration with Beale’s Security Forces mentioned this focus on mindset and said that during the demo, “it got a little hard but there’s a lot of people behind me, supporting me.”
![Wheatland Union High School football team touches down on Beale AFB]()
