In 15 games this year, Kaegan Ash broke a 72-year-old single-season rushing record in Texas with video game numbers:
- 4,562 rushing yards
- 15.2 yards per carry
- 67 rushing touchdowns
- 9 receiving touchdowns
Statistically, its the most prolific running back season in Texas high school history. The scary part? He's an even better linebacker.
Let's zoom out.
At its highest levels, high school football is, increasingly, becoming more like the college game with high-profile national matchups featuring loaded teams loaded with players who have specialized skill sets. Carefully managed snap counts. Load management in blowouts. An eye on the future prize.
MORE: Why Buford (GA) is SN's high school football national champion
But in rural towns scattered across the country where high school football is still the only game in town on Friday nights, thousands of two-way players still shine on both sides of the ball and special teams. Some literally never leave the field because teams don't have the luxury of sitting stars. Some schools barely have enough players to safely field an 11-man team.
And because those players rarely leave the field, they sometimes put up numbers that are considered almost untouchable. Consider the records held by the legendary Kenneth Hall – the famed "Sugar Land Express" who dominated Texas high school football in the early 1950s. Entering the 2025 season, Hall was still the king of Texas prep running backs with 11,232 career rushing yards, and he also held the single-season rushing yards record with 4,045 yards in his senior season in 1953.
That is, until a kid named Kaegan Ash came along.
Ash plays for the Mount Enterprise [TX] Wildcats in East Texas, and we featured him in October when he was still more than 3,000 yards shy of Hall's career record. On December 12, Hall's record finally fell as Ash ran for 240 yards on 32 carries in a loss in the Texas 2A state semifinals (and his final high school game) to officially pass Hall by 160 yards, finishing his career with 11,382 yards.
One week prior, he broke Hall's single-season mark, ultimately smashing the record by more than 500 yards. Ash finished the season with 4,562 rushing yards, a mind-melting number, considering it came in 15 games. Had Mount Enterprise played one more game, he would have needed 438 yards to eclipse 5,000 for the season. That seems absurd until considering Ash surpassed that mark four times in 2025.
For good measure, he also broke the national single-season scoring record with 484 points, breaking the record previously held by Brett Law of Indiana.
He's an even better inside linebacker.
At least according to Texas Tech where Ash is committed to suit up as a linebacker. This is where his two-way credentials come into play as the senior star was also one of his team's top defenders at linebacker. Ash finished the season with 111 tackles, including 21 stops behind the line.
Ash represents a throwback era of sorts. In a swiftly evolving national high school football landscape dominated by lucrative shoe deals, big money NIL deals and five-star Instagram fame, there's still room for the two-way small-town legend who serves up Tall Tales.
As for Hall, his record outlived him, but only by a few months. The Sugar Land Express passed away in early March of this year.