Eastern Washington football fills out coaching staff with familiar faces from Sioux Falls

It was January, and the only two offensive coaches on the Eastern Washington staff were Jim Chapin and Marc Anderson.

The Eagles were coming off a 3-8 football season, Chapin’s first as offensive coordinator, Anderson’s eighth overall and first as tight ends coach.

“We had goals in mind,” Chapin said on Wednesday. “Marc and I made decisions about what our goals were, what we wanted out of this job, out of life.”

They wanted to do things right at Eastern, Chapin said. They wanted everyone in the program to be on the same page.

“Our job was to get it back to where it belonged,” Chapin said.

And so, with assistant coaching positions to fill, Chapin looked to a pair of familiar faces. He hired Brandon Johnson-Farrell to be the team’s running backs coach and Hayden Mace to lead the offensive line. Both worked previously with Chapin at Division II Sioux Falls.

“Once those positions opened up, it was pretty easy for me,” Chapin said. “I was pretty passionate about bringing those guys on board. Thankfully (EWU head) coach (Aaron) Best was too.”

Along with new wide receivers coach Jeff McDaniels, the Eagles’ offensive staff is more than half new this season, but they have so far leaned on their familiarity from that time in South Dakota to jumpstart Year 2 with Chapin as coordinator.

“It’s just a chemistry thing,” said Johnson-Farrell, who was at Sioux Falls from 2016 to 2022. “You know those guys’ personalities, and they know my family, I know theirs. They are friends outside of the game, and the communication comes easier. The hard times become easier.”

Like so many programs in college football, Eastern has been a place where coaches have come and gone, often to FBS programs. Chapin is the team’s fourth full-time offensive coordinator since the start of 2016, when Best held the position. Numerous assistant coaches have come and gone as well.

Hiring familiar faces can help speed up the acclimation process for new staff and for players.

“Continuity’s big,” Best said. “Bringing those guys in has given us a shot to have a little more seamless transition from where we were to where we are now, and it helps with the prior relationships with coach Chapin for sure.”

Chapin actually came and visited the program in 2019, when Ian Shoemaker was offensive coordinator and Chapin’s friend Pat McCann coached the wide receivers. That trip was a precursor to Chapin being hired when McCann – who had since been promoted to interim offensive coordinator to replace Shoemaker – left Eastern to take a position at Fresno State after the 2021 season.

That visit also helped Chapin fill his offensive staff at Sioux Falls.

“I knew I was going to have an opening,” Chapin said, “and all those guys were like, ‘you’ve got to hire Hayden Mace.’ ”

Mace was at that time a quality control assistant at Eastern; he then became Sioux Falls’ offensive line coach; now he’s back at Eastern coaching that position group for the Eagles.

“The day I left Eastern, I told coach Best this is a place I’d love to find a way to get back to someday,” said Mace, who is originally from Bend, Oregon, and played college ball at Division III Linfield. “In this profession, you’re reliant on coaches and their paths and people moving on to other opportunities, waiting in the wings and hoping something pops up.”

All of that movement has now given Eastern a new-look coaching staff that wants to ensure 2022’s record was an anomaly for a program that hadn’t had a losing season before that since 2006.

Toward that end, Chapin said he is coaching the offense to eliminate “big picture anxieties” and to instead “create an unselfish unit that’s built to last.”

“We want to be process-oriented. We want to focus on each play, six seconds at a time,” Chapin said. “Our big push is to focus on action. Eliminate hype. Focus on the job.”

He wants that to show up in the way players compete in practice but also celebrate the successes of their teammates. They put depth charts together but don’t talk about them much, he said, as worrying about the pecking order is a distraction and contradicts the reality that everyone needs to be ready to play.

Communicating all of that to players is made easier by the familiarity amongst coaches.

“You can see (Chapin) is a very process-oriented guy, Johnson-Farrell said, “and that mindset really helped us at Sioux Falls. We’re not looking past today, not past this rep, not past this film session. What can I do right now to prepare myself for those future moments without those moments creeping into my head? We’ve got to think about right now, in the present, before we get to think about playoffs.”

In four years with Chapin and Johnson-Farrell on staff together at Sioux Falls, the Cougars went 32-14. With Mace as offensive coordinator last year, they went 8-3.

“It’s something that I joined; it’s definitely not something I helped build,” Mace said of Sioux Falls’ success. “… From an organization and culture (standpoint), that’s what (Chapin) spent a lot of his time on and invested in. Over the next couple of years he recruited guys he wanted for his offense.”

Mace said that when he returned to Cheney after three years in Sioux Falls there were not a ton of major differences. Much was the same, starting with Best, who he called the backbone of the program.

“He’s been a part of this place for almost 30 years,” Mace said. “That type of stability and knowledge of the program and the Big Sky and how to do things the Eastern way were all the same. With those similarities and comforts, and with the ability to work with coach Chapin and coach BJ (Johnson-Farrell) and other guys I’d rubbed elbows with, it was really, really good to get back here.”

The Eagles have about two weeks to prepare for their opener against North Dakota State on Sept. 2 in Minneapolis. But dwelling on that game now would go against the mindset Chapin wants his players to have. Better to focus on the next rep in the next practice.

“We want to push our chips all-in on the process,” he said, “and if we can focus on doing things right day in and day out, the outcome will take care of itself.”