When people talk about Lexington football, they talk about Gil Rector. In his 30 years leading the Minutemen, his teams won 231 games, 10 Missouri River Valley Conference Championships, 13 district championships and five state titles.
Rector was born in 1940 in Herman, Mo. He graduated from Higginsville High School in 1959 and then moved on to Tyler, Texas Junior College before finishing his degree at Central Missouri State University in 1965.
His first coaching job was at Carrollton High School where he was an assistant football and track coach from 1965-67. He then moved on to Lexington and was named the Minutemen’s head coach in 1968 severing in that capacity until his retirement in 1998.
He was named the Missouri Class 2A Coach of the Year in 1976 and 1980 and the Class 3A Coach of the Year in 1994. He is in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame and the Missouri High School Hall of Fame. He was also inducted into the Higginsville Husker Hall of Fame in 1994.
The football Stadium at Lexington was named Gil Rector stadium in his honor in 1997. He currently resides in Lexington.
