On Monday night, Chad Morris sat in a Tulsa hotel room and decompressed.

It had been a long 48 hours.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Morris said over the phone. “I’m a 41-year old man and I’ve been crying like a baby over the last few days. It’s tough.”

Morris was announced as the new offensive coordinator at the University of Tulsa Monday afternoon, less than 24 hours after riding in Lake Travis’ celebratory parade for a third straight state championship. Immediately after that parade, he informed the Cavalier players and coaches that he would be leaving them after two seasons in which they went 32-0 and won two 4A Division 1 state titles.

“They knew something was up for a while,” Morris said of his players. “They knew something like this was coming and I did my best to keep the leaders of the team informed so that they could spread the word to the whole team. But that was hard because I really wanted last week to be about the kids, to be about celebrating another title. They’ve earned that, so it was very hard to put them in that position.”

But just because the team, the coaches and the community saw this coming, it didn’t make it any easier. For Morris, it was the toughest decision of his career.

“Maybe the older I get, the more perspective I have, but it’s just the value we place on friendship and building relationships in the community,” he said. “We ask parents for their sons to buy in and sell out, and we always talk about how a commitment is more than 60 minutes a day. That starts in the home. Just having a community that was hungry to sell out for a program and a coach. It was the little things we did, like our breakfast of champions. It was those little things that made this the toughest decision so far.”

Well, that and one other thing.

“Not to mention we’re going to be really good next year,” he said. “That’s an incredible group coming back, and one that’s going to have a shot at another title. That’s not easy to walk away from.”

Nor was it easy to walk away from the support he had as the leader of the football program.

“Being under the leadership of Dr. [Rocky] Kirk was special. This is a guy that hired me without even meeting me. I wasn’t sure about it, but he swayed me.  Working with him and Mrs. [Kim] Brents was key,” Morris said of the LTISD superintendent and high school principal. “The support level was amazing.”

But as Morris sorted through the various things he was thankful for over the two years at Lake Travis, it seemed every time, he came back to the players. The hardest part, was saying goodbye Sunday afternoon.

“When you listen to those kids, and you see their emotion, everyone of them came up and hugged me and told me they loved me and thanked me,” Morris said. “They’re going to boast with pride when they see us on TV next year, and they should take a lot of pride in this because they really got me here. I couldn’t have done it without such a great group of kids. And they’ve earned every great thing that’s going to happen to them next year and every year after that.”

Morris’ growing reputation as an innovator reached its peak at the high school level over the last two seasons, thanks, in part, to arguably the most talented teams he’s ever coached. The more the Cavaliers won, the more attention Morris and his staff got, and all of the sudden, both Lake Travis and its head coach had a national reputation as a winning machine. That’s when the phone calls started coming, and Morris realized things were changing.

“When you look back at the success that we’ve had, and the contacts we’ve made over the years by placing kids in D1 programs over the last 10 years, and with this last year’s success – that’s what got us here,” he said. “With [Texas A&M] head coach Mike Sherman calling us and having us come out to help this summer, you start thinking, ‘Wow, this is really happening.’”

Then a pretty popular magazine came calling.

“There were a couple articles in Sports Illustrated that recognized us, and you started to realize that people were really taking notice on a national level,” Morris said.

Then Tulsa head coach Todd Graham called. First, during the second week of the state playoffs. At the time, Morris was obviously consumed with another playoff run. He turned the first offer down. But Graham was persistent, and Morris started to realize what he needed to consider.

After a few weeks of soul-searching and spending time with both his high school team, and the campus at Tulsa, he decided it was the opportunity of a lifetime. It was a chance to go to a level some coaches only dream of getting to, and he was getting the offer at age 41. The offer reached a point where Morris’ wife, Paula, would no longer have to work, and it included plenty of security if things went south.

It didn’t make the task less daunting to consider. When asked, in that quiet hotel room after the whirlwind tour, why he felt he would be one of the few successful high school coaches at the collegiate level, he paused before laying it all out.

“No. 1, you’ve just got to believe in what you’re doing and in yourself,” he said. “And after that, you look at the program and the personnel you’ve got in place. The system is great, but you have to have the personnel in place to get it done. I think we’ve got that at Tulsa with a bunch of kids returning. This is a great situation and I’m excited.”

As for what he leaves behind?

“They’ll be fine,” Morris said. “The kids and the staff are so close, and I hope it stays that way, with all respect to Dr. Kirk’s search. I have all the confidence in the world in Hank [Carter], and he’s been prepping for a moment like this for 10 years. The way I look at it, he’ll never be more ready. If he can’t be a head coach now, he never will be. And he’s got the best staff in the state of Texas to work with.”