It's 3:45 a.m. in Mendota, Calif. The migrant farm worker town of 11,000, just 40 miles west of Fresno, is pitch-black. Within 30 minutes, the rumble of multipassenger vans and a stream of headlights will fill Highways 180 and 33 leading in and out of Mendota, a community that is 98 percent Hispanic.

Robert "Beto" Mejia, the Mendota High School football coach, has agreed to meet me and my camera crew and to show us how many of his football players spend their summers preparing for each season. Mejia, a Mendota native and graduate of Fresno State, has been the coach for two seasons, in 2011 and 2012, and led the Aztecs to back-to-back Central Section Division VI championships.

The football team hadn't won a section title in its previous 18 years. I wondered how he won all of a sudden. He called it "The Aztec Way."

"It's just accountability, a little more discipline, commitment," he says. But time and again, Mejia would always come back to one thing: "These kids just work hard."