Felton Wright of Junction was a four-year football letterman on some of Howard Payne’s early successful football teams and also served as an assistant and head football coach. Wright, nicknamed “Pooch,” also was known as the “Knute Rockne of West Texas” for his innovation as a high school coach at Ballinger. He was captain of the Howard Payne team that upset Texas A&M 13-7 at Kyle Field in College Station in 1922. Howard Payne went on to win the Texas Conference and A&M won the Southwest Conference. He was an all-conference tackle in 1921 and 1922. After coaching the line at Howard Payne for a year, he coached in Denison and then at Ballinger, where he won seven district titles and five regional titles in 16 seasons. While at Ballinger, he invented an early sauna machine, patented a T-Center to allow a quarterback to practice taking snaps and developed the Ballinger Blocking Board, a scoreboard that credited the work of offensive linemen. Wright came back to Howard Payne in 1946 as an assistant football coach and took over as head coach in 1948. He went into ranching and worked for Howard Payne in 1963 as Dean of Men, retiring in 1968. He died in 1971 and was inducted posthumously into the Howard Payne Athletics Hall of Fame and the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame.