High School Coaching
After he left professional football, Doherty began coaching in 1948 at Stamps High School in Stamps in Lafayette County (pronounced Leh FAY ette) in southwestern Arkansas. There he turned around a winless year into two district championships and one second-place statewide.
In 1950, he came to Minden, the seat of Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana, where he taught physical education and mathematics, including geometry, and coached the Minden High School Crimson Tide through 1957, mostly during the principalship of his close friend Wayne Wynn Williams, Sr. (1917–2000). When Doherty arrived, MHS had won only one football games in the past three seasons. Doherty turned things around to the extent that the Crimson Tide won the 1952 district championship with a 9-2 record. "We went from the bottom of the list to the top of the list in a short time," Williams, who served as the parish superintendent from 1973–1978, recalled.
In 1953, the Crimson Tide again won the district championship with a 9-2 record. The final game, played on Thanksgiving Day afternoon against the in-parish rival, the Springhill Lumberjacks, was particularly gratifying to Doherty because the Springhill team then included future Heisman Trophy winner, John David Crow.
Minden under Doherty also defeated arch-rival Haynesville (northern Claiborne Parish) for the first time in a quarter century. In 1954, with a 13-1 record, the team won the state championship. That was followed by another district championship in 1955 and a second state championship, again with a 13-1 record, in 1956. One of Doherty's players in 1956 was Billy Joe Booth, who later starred for Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and then played for nine years with the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League. Shreveport sports writers began referring to Minden as the "Home of the Champions".
After the first state championship in 1954, Doherty accepted the head coach position at 3-A Bolton High School in Alexandria, the seat of Rapides Parish, but he stayed just one day and promptly returned to the 2-A Minden High School. Williams said that Doherty had the penchant for making an average player into a great player: "It seemed every year, he was getting five to nine players a scholarship to Tech. Sometimes they even referred to Louisiana Tech as 'Minden Tech'."
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