Home near the holidays

Do the math. If 170 or 180 players turn out for football every fall at Saint John’s University – and they do – that’s enough for a first string and second string … and a seventh string and an eighth string.

And early on as a Johnnie, Phil Giesen sometimes felt he was at the end of the string – or hanging on by a thread.

But circumstances have changed dramatically in four years, and on Saturday the Coeur d’Alene High School graduate will start at tight end for the Johnnies when they visit Whitworth College for a second-round game in the NCAA Division III football playoffs at the Pine Bowl.

The Pirates ran their season record to 11-0 last week by overcoming Occidental in the final minute of their first-round game – the first post-season football victory in school history – and Giesen admitted he was pulling for them.

“I was – my team wasn’t,” he said with a laugh. “They would have rather played in Los Angeles – and I don’t blame them. But I wanted to come home and have a chance to play in front of some friends and family and I’m glad that’s how it’s worked out.”

The only person who may be happier is his father, John, a recently retired orthopedic surgeon from Hayden – and a Johnnie himself, a two-way end, class of 1960.

“I was prepared to go to all the playoff games,” John Giesen said. “I just didn’t think one would be in my backyard.”

Father-son connections at Saint John’s are nothing new. When Giesen was a freshman in 2003, he was one of 18 Johnnies whose fathers had played for John Gagliardi, the remarkable 80-year-old coaching legend who is in his 54th year at the Minnesota school.

In this case, there’s a small discrepancy in the stories of how Giesen wound up in Collegeville. Giesen acknowledged that his father “sparked” his interest. He’d been a decent high school tight end at Coeur d’Alene, but he wasn’t on anyone’s radar to play college football – and probably would have attended Montana or Montana State as a student only until he took a visit to Saint John’s.

So how much fatherly arm-twisting did it take?

“None – seriously,” John Giesen protested. “Once he met Gagliardi, I didn’t have to sell anything. He spent half a day walking around campus with Phil, making him feel real important and it was done.

“You know, because Gagliardi is such a warm guy, Phil might have thought – and I thought – that he was high on the list of players they wanted. But that doesn’t necessarily translate.”

No kidding.

Giesen showed up the year the Johnnies won their second D-III title – and Gagliardi’s fourth national championship – with a 14-0 run, and he confessed that “it was pretty intimidating.

“We had an incredible senior class and I wasn’t physically up to playing at the college level.”

He didn’t actually get on the field much until his junior year, when he played mostly on special teams, and even this year was part of a three-player mix at tight end that included fellow senior Matt Keating and junior Brett Saladin. Then Saladin suffered a herniated disc that ended his season, and for the season’s sixth game against St. Olaf’s, Giesen jumped into the starting job.

“I hadn’t done that since high school,” he said, “so I wanted to make it count.”

Which he did. Giesen caught four passes for 122 yards, including touchdowns of 36 and 48 yards in a 37-21 romp.

There is nothing quite like the Saint John’s experience in college football – and, of course, it starts with Gagliardi and his curious methods. Though he has a full staff of assistants now and isn’t the one-man band he was in John Giesen’s playing days, Gagliardi’s program has hardly changed. Players still call him John, there is no tackling in practice, no mandatory weights or morning wind sprints. And even as other D-III programs ratchet up the demands on their players and improve, the Johnnies continue to win as much as ever.

Which means more and more players want to be a part of it, just as Phil Giesen did.

“You see the classes dwindle as you get older and guys realize they’ll never see much playing time,” he said. “That’s the nature of the game. But there’s always just as many every fall, younger guys. And some of the older guys stick it out all four years even if they don’t get to play much just because they enjoy the environment and being part of something as special as this.”

And for every couple of those, there’s a Phil Giesen, who’s been able to shinny up that string all the way to the top.