By Joel Langton
The 830 Times
It’s been a telling weekend for Del Rio High School Rams football coach Daniel Infante.
His team is trying to bounce back from a three-year stretch that didn’t leave the Ram faithful much to cheer about. Del Rio went 5-25 during that span, finishing 2-8 in 2023, 3-7 in 2024 and 0-10 in 2025.
Following the retirement of former head coach Fiacro Ramirez, Del Rio turned to Infante, who arrived with some impressive credentials. As offensive coordinator at Sharyland High School, Infante was named the Texas High School Coaches Association’s 2025-26 Region 7 Class 5A Assistant Coach of the Year after directing a high-powered offense.
Now, Infante is trying to revive and revitalize the Rams, and Friday night he got his first real opportunity to check the pulse of the program when his players finally got to tee off against someone who wasn’t a classmate.
The Rams hosted Eagle Pass’s C.C. Winn in a scrimmage designed to show both teams where they stood with the regular season approaching.
The teams began with 16-play sessions. Del Rio’s first units more than held their own, with both teams scoring while also finding areas that needed work.
Then they turned on the clock.
The teams battled for 12 minutes in a game-like setting before about 200 fans, with Del Rio controlling much of the action. If you’re strictly about the score — and scrimmage scores don’t count once the season starts — the Rams won that portion 13-7.
Infante, however, wasn’t ecstatic.
The scrimmage showed him the Rams need to start faster, something he has noticed going back to the team’s summer workouts.
“We need to start a little bit faster,” Infante said. “As coaches, we’ve got to get to the drawing board and start a little bit quicker.”
Conditioning will be one area of emphasis this week after Infante felt the Rams lacked some conditioning early in the scrimmage. The team practices in the morning, but Infante said he plans to use some afternoon athletic periods to help prepare the players for their next test.
Still, Infante saw progress from an offense learning a dramatically different system from what the players have run in the past.
“We haven’t put in the full offensive system yet, so we’re still working out a lot of the wrinkles,” Infante said. “But we’re getting there, and the guys are progressing very nicely.”
Infante said the ultimate goal is for Del Rio to play fast, make opponents keep pace and spread the football around to the Rams’ playmakers.
Saturday morning, the rebuilding project moved from the field to the locker room.
Infante and a group of volunteers set aside time to give the Rams’ locker room a facelift, another piece of his effort to change the culture surrounding the program.
Infante declined to criticize the previous condition of the locker room, choosing instead to talk about what he believes it should represent.
“A locker room is to be a home away from home,” Infante said. “A place where our athletes can be proud to call their own and something they can remember a little about the program’s history.”
The locker room received an all-new look, including new lockers and fresh paint, and Infante felt afterward that the players had something closer to that elusive home away from home.
“With the help of community members, businesses and our football boosters, along with the help of Frenchey McCrea Jr. and the assistance of our coaching staff, today we did what we wanted to accomplish,” Infante wrote on his personal Facebook page. “The new lockers that we set up today in the locker room is one of the first steps to get this program back to where it belongs!”
One weekend certainly doesn’t erase three difficult seasons.
But whether it’s playing faster between the lines or putting some pride back into the place where the players prepare to take the field, Infante has started putting his stamp on Del Rio football.
The revival, it appears, has begun.
