A beloved high school football coach and his wife, a junior high school teacher, are being remembered by their Texas community after they died in a car accident on Saturday, August 15.
Jeremy Jenkins, head football coach and athletic director at East Bernard High School, and his wife, Brandy Jenkins, were killed when their 2025 Tesla Model Y went off the side of State Highway 60 in Wharton County and overturned just after 10 p.m., according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Jeremy, 51, and Brandy, 46, were both pronounced dead on the scene. The crash remains under investigation.
The couple are survived by their three sons: Tyson, Gage and Jake.
“Right now, football doesn’t matter,” the East Bernard Athletic Booster Club said in a statement. “Wins don’t matter. None of it does. What matters is surrounding these boys with the same kind of love and support their family has given to so many of ours.”
The statement continued, “So we will do what East Bernard does. We will show up. We will wrap our arms around these boys, their family, our coaches and our athletes. And we will carry one another through the days ahead. Please pray for the Jenkins boys. Pray for their family. Pray for our coaches, our athletes, our school and this entire community that loved Coach Jenkins and his family so deeply.”
Superintendent Courtney Hudgins confirmed the deaths of Jeremy and Brandy in a letter to the community on Sunday, August 16.
“Jeremy and Brandy were much more than their titles or the roles they held within our schools,” Hudgins wrote. “They were colleagues, educators, mentors, friends and family.”
The football coach was remembered as somebody who “watched film non-stop, coached up our kids in the most loving way, truly wanted what was best for ALL kids, challenged us to see things through a different lens, loved his fellow coaches, and was an ‘all in’ kind of man.”
Brandy had recently been hired by the school district, and Hudgins noted that students already “loved her.”
“East Bernard has always been a place where people show up for one another, and now is a time when that love and support are needed more than ever,” the superintendent’s statement added. “In the days ahead, we will need to lean on one another with love, patience, compassion and grace.”
Jeremy was preparing to enter his third season as head coach at East Bernard, guiding the team to the Class 3A Division II state semifinals last year.
East Bernard is scheduled to open the season at home on August 28.
