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Gus Malzahn leads his players at Shiloh Christian in a postgame prayer in this undated photo. (Shiloh Christian Yearbook)

(Auburn coach Gus Malzahn's rise through the high school ranks will be celebrated Friday with his induction into the Arkansas High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame. As Malzahn approaches his first season as an SEC head coach, AL.com takes a road trip through Arkansas to chronicle Malzahn's ascension from Hughes to Springdale that included several championship runs and the development of his hurry-up, no-huddle offense -- all before an eventual jump into the college coaching ranks.)

SPRINGDALE, Arkansas – Gus Malzahn's arrival at Shiloh Christian, a private Class A school, was not met with much fanfare.

His teams at Hughes (Ark.) High had been competitive, but Malzahn hadn't experimented yet with the offense that would make him famous.

Still, Shiloh Christian athletic director Jimmy Dykes knew what he was looking for in a football coach: a good Christian man, a sharp football mind, and a disciplinarian.

Dykes interviewed three or four coaches. In the first 30 minutes with Malzahn, Dykes knew who he wanted to hire because of four words the 30-year-old coach kept repeating: discipline, organization, toughness and accountability.

"The more I talked to him the more I felt he was going to be very successful no matter where he went," said Dykes, now a college basketball analyst at ESPN.

Little did Dykes know he’d just hired a coach who would change football in the state of Arkansas.

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Shiloh Christian was attractive to Malzahn for several reasons. For one, the support at the small Christian school located in the heart of Springdale is very strong. It's also surrounded by some powerful leaders and businesses: the headquarters for Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt and Walmart are only a few miles away from the heart of campus.

Jimmy Dykes also coached Shiloh Christian's girls' cross country team in 1997. (Shiloh Christian Yearbook)

And the football job wasn’t a dead-end stop, by any means. The Saints were 12-1 the year before Malzahn's arrival, but no team in school history had gone beyond the third round of the playoffs.

"He saw an opportunity there to be the only private school in Northwest Arkansas at the time that could build something and build something with quality quickly," Dykes said.

Malzahn entered his first season with the idea of using a pass-first offense, which excited the young roster. He followed through with that promise, but not without experiencing a few bumps and bruises.

His first game was a disaster: a blowout at Prairie Grove, a Class AAA school that utilized the Wing T offense and ran the Saints into the dirt.

Shiloh Christian's players were so tired in the second half, their legs began to cramp and the players crumbled to the turf. Prairie Grove's players volunteered to help stretch the Saints' legs on the playing field.

"I remember standing by Gus halfway through second half and I could hear a parent from our stands yelling," Dykes said. "'Hey, Dykes, nice hire!' We glanced at each other. We couldn't really say anything at the time."

Simply put, it was embarrassing, said Josh Floyd, the Saints' sophomore quarterback. The Saints were forced to run through the pain -- punishment, he said -- after a Monday practice. "I don't think anyone cramped after that Prairie Grove game," Floyd said. "He had us scared."

"He took that to heart," said Danny Abshier, Prairie Grove's head coach. "He's a winner. He always has been. When something like that happens to a winner, he makes something different happen and he did."

The Saints rebounded and reached the playoffs, advancing to the second round, and in that game, the genesis of Malzahn’s hurry-up, no-huddle offense began.

Malzahn, who loved to experiment and run gadget plays, had the crazy idea of running a no-huddle offense during the first two series of their playoff game.

"We were smoking them," Floyd said. "They weren't prepared for it all, and then we stopped. We lost."

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Gus Malzahn, pictured here in 1997, was also Shiloh Christian's dean of students. (Shiloh Christian Yearbook)

The biggest innovation of Malzahn’s career arose mostly out of necessity.

That season-ending loss in the playoffs and the success of the no-huddle approach stuck with Malzahn in the offseason.

He hired a new offensive coordinator, Chris Wood, who coached (as a student assistant) a no-huddle system at Arkansas Tech. The two met through a mutual friend a few years earlier in Hughes.

Malzahn devised a system that included a board with numbers and colors, two coaches and a student assistant standing to the side to help signal in plays. He named plays after biblical characters -- they signaled these in from the sideline -- to help players remember the formations. It was a simple system to learn and it was also a fun offense for the players. No one else in the state was doing this at the time.

"We started running two- and three-play drives at the first of games the year before," Malzahn said. "We'd get great momentum, and then we have to go back to huddling and we'd lose it. So we decided in 1997 that summer to revamp everything and see what happens."

There was more motivation to the change, too. Malzahn knew the Saints would never win a state championship by doing things the conventional way.

"At that time in Arkansas, in the playoffs, teams in northwest Arkansas did not come off the mountain from the smaller schools and go deep and win state titles because of the athleticism and speed that was all over our state," Wood said. "How could we balance that? How could we even the playing field?"

Malzahn’s answer was to crank up the pace. Simply put, more plays mean more opportunities to score. He wanted to run 75 to 80 plays per game.

Shiloh Christian opened the 1997 season just as it did the 1996 season: against Prairie Grove. This time the Saints handed the Tigers a devastating blowout. Lined up in a Cover-3 look, Prairie Grove had no time to recover and adjust as the Saints unveiled their new offense that included a vertical passing game and screens. From there, the blowouts kept coming.

Coaches couldn’t find a way to stop Shiloh Christian on the field, so they tried to put up roadblocks off the field. Before 1997 ended, some schools even voted to not play Shiloh Christian in any sport, saying the private school had an unfair advantage because it awarded financial aid to students. No wrongdoing was found by the Arkansas Activities Association.

Meanwhile, the Saints were on a roll.

Josh Floyd's jersey was retired at Shiloh Christian, though he has since "unretired" the jersey as he enters his 10th season as the Saints' coach. (Brandon Marcello/bmarcello@al.com)

Rhett Lashlee's jersey was also retired at Shiloh Christian, where he broke the national record for passing yards in a single game (672) during a 70-64 victory against Junction City in 1999. (Brandon Marcello/bmarcello@al.com)

The Saints broke several state and national records during Malzahn's tenure. His five-year career here ended with a 63-8-1 overall record and two state titles in his final three seasons. He was 56-2-1 in the final four seasons that followed his 6-6 start in 1996.

Floyd broke state and national passing records during his three years as starter, finishing with an incredible 66 passing touchdowns in 1998 while throwing for 5,221 yards and rushing for 657.

Rhett Lashlee, his successor, broke the national record for touchdowns with 171 in his career. He also passed for 672 yards and eight touchdowns in a 70-64 victory against Junction City in the 1999 playoffs, and holds the state record with 40 wins as the starter.

The Saints won 44 consecutive games during the run, which included back-to-back state championships in 1998 and 1999 and two state runner-up finishes. Between 1998 and 1999, Malzahn almost left for Benton, but his wife expressed hesitation when they arrived for the job. They came back to Shiloh after two weeks.

And back in northwest Arkansas, a philosophy shift was taking place.

Prairie Grove had always leaned heavily on the Wing T offense -- a run-first, pass-last approach that many teams in Arkansas had utilized in the past, and Abshier kept playing Malzahn’s teams even after all the other large schools stopped scheduling Shiloh Christian.

Prairie Grove enjoyed some success, but then Malzahn’s offense started spawning blowouts. At the height of Shiloh's success, Abshier and others would joke at coaching conventions, asking if the Saints had anyone coaching the punters. After all, they rarely took the field.

"After one game, another drumming, I told Gus that I'm done," Abshier said. "You broke my spirit. You can find another game. He was kind of hurt. He felt like we always brought them good competition, but he actually broke my spirit. I kind of regret that because he's such a good guy, but then we got back to playing Shiloh again."

A few years later, Abshier hired John Elder, a former Shiloh assistant coach who helped run Malzahn's hurry-up, no-huddle system.

He wasn’t the only coach who knew it was time to change.

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Shiloh Christian Stadium has won seven state championships in football. (Brandon Marcello/bmarcello@al.com)

At the height of his run, Malzahn’s players thought it was all football, all the time.

"You're walking the hall with your girlfriend and he's pulling you over to the side and asking, what are you doing on this play?" Floyd said. "What are you doing on Blue Daniel?"

Players respected him. Some didn't quite believe he was human until one day he invited a few players over to his house for a pizza party. Malzahn's wife, Kristi, finally shed some light on Malzahn's hidden humor when she pulled out a video of her husband singing karaoke and break-dancing.

Gus Malzahn, break dancing.

"That was the first time we were like, man, this guy is actually a normal person and has a normal life," Floyd said. "It was good for us to see he can have some fun, too."

Malzahn’s approach worked.

It wasn't just Shiloh Christian's offense that turned heads. Malzahn's former assistants scoff at the notion that Malzahn cares only about coaching offense. No, they say, he earned his reputation here as an innovative football mind -- on offense, defense and special teams.

PHOTO GALLERY: Malzahn's Shiloh Christian years (1996-2000)

The Saints were very aggressive, calling onside kicks after scoring touchdowns to put more pressure on teams. Malzahn also stepped back before a playoff game against Harding Academy, another hurry-up offense, and decided to switch from a 4-3 alignment to a "robber defense" in a 3-1-1 look. The Saints won 41-18 in the semifinals of the 1999 playoffs.

The criticism kept coming from opponents, even though Malzahn privately had a threshold for blowouts: he called off the dogs when his teams were up by 35 points.

"He had to become a master of not scoring," Wood said.

There were several big moments on the field for the Saints, of course, but none bigger than one of the most talked about games in 2000, when Springdale High, one of the largest schools in the state, decided to play the small-school Saints.

The game ended in a 7-7 tie.

"That was a signature moment in Shiloh's time," Wood said. "On any given Friday, we can line up and play anybody."

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The coaching tree Malzahn started at Shiloh has deep roots.

Wood, who replaced Malzahn as the Saints' coach and won a state title in 2011, moved on to Springdale Har-Ber and won another state title in 2009. Floyd, the former quarterback, has coached Shiloh ever since, leading the Saints to four more state titles behind the hurry-up, no-huddle offense.

Wood, too, still pushes the tempo at Har-Ber.

Lashlee, of course, is Malzahn's offensive coordinator, one of the fastest-rising assistant coaches in college football. Many of his other former players and assistants have followed his footsteps as coaches in Northwest Arkansas or elsewhere.

And the decision to stay at Shiloh Christian in 1999 paid off. That big game against Springdale in 2000 proved to be a big moment for Malzahn. The big boys in the state were finally paying attention, and with it came his next big opportunity to become Springdale High's coach in 2001.

"He's worked hard. He's got great confidence in himself. There's not an arrogance about it," Dykes said. "He has great confidence in knowing what he wants done. He holds people accountable. He did it his first year at Shiloh and he'll do it his first year at Auburn. Gus has that in him."