‘Bury your ego’: Coordinators face the tough task of incorporating their own schemes, while not stepping on the head coach’s toes
Jim Chapin was, by his own admission, an outsider when he was first hired at Eastern Washington before the 2022 season.
He came into a program with plenty of success: a national FCS title in 2010, an offense that led the nation in yardage the year before and a history of producing NFL-caliber receivers.
But Chapin, who came to Eastern from Division II Sioux Falls in South Dakota, was a coach without a ton of experience out west, unlike most of EWU’s previous offensive coordinators. And though Sioux Falls had been successful – they were 32-14 in Chapin’s four years as OC – on a personal level, the EWU coaching staff needed to get to know each other.
“The great thing about (EWU head) coach Aaron Best is he cares about coaches, he cares about players, and he cares about doing it right,” Chapin said earlier this month. “He knows what it takes. He’s seen what it takes.
“I had to learn what makes Eastern special, what makes it tick, and in a year and a half, I’ve learned a ton.”
The relationships between a head coach and his coordinators are crucial to a football program’s success, coaches across the Big Sky said. For the second straight year at Eastern, those three men will be the same, with Best as head coach, Chapin as offensive coordinator and Jeff Copp leading the defense.
After guiding the Vandals to a turnaround 7-5 season in 2022, Idaho second-year coach Jason Eck also has back offensive coordinator Luke Schleusner and defensive coordinator Rob Aurich.
In Pullman, head coach Jake Dickert is still getting to know new coordinators Ben Arbuckle (offense) and Jeff Schmedding (defense) at Washington State.
“I just love open and honest communication. I give our coaches a ton of feedback. And I think it’s on them always to understand – bury your ego,” Dickert said this week. “This is a way to learn and grow. That’s what we have with all of our coaches, not just Ben (Arbuckle). So we’re still getting on the same page on how that looks, and that’s why we extended this early game prep week so we can make sure we’re on the same page.”
Those are some of the guiding principles coaches said are the key to these relationships: that there be clear and honest communication, that the hierarchy holds together, and that the whole framework is founded on trust.
“You have to hire people you trust,” Cal Poly coach Paul Wulff said. “Trust them to do their job. Communicate what you want to accomplish. I have to trust they’re going to do it the way we discussed. … I think that’s where it all starts.”
It’s ‘all about relationships’
When Best hired Chapin to coordinate the Eagles’ offense and coach their quarterbacks, he did so recognizing that the Eagles needed to incorporate more run-pass option into their schemes and that some tinkering with what had led Eastern to so much success was needed. But he also didn’t know Chapin.
“I had guys on staff who had worked with him, and he had a ton of success,” Best said. “When you look at his track record when he was at Sioux Falls and what he stood for, it was a no-brainer.”
In its final year under Chapin, Sioux Falls’ offense led the Northern Sun Conference in rushing (217.2 yards per game) and allowed just eight sacks. Best had met Chapin before, but they’d never worked together.
“I don’t know how he coaches quarterbacks (from the interview),” Best said. “You don’t know until (coaches) show up.”
Programs across the Big Sky went through the process of hiring coaches this offseason, including five that named new head coaches.
Two hired outside the program: Idaho State picked Cody Hawkins, the offensive coordinator at UC Davis; Northern Colorado chose Ed Lamb, BYU’s special teams coordinator.
Three promoted from within: Weber State hired OC Mickey Mental; Cal Poly went with its OC, Wulff; and Sacramento State elevated DC Andy Thompson to the top position.
Even with that continuity, Thompson – who took over after Troy Taylor left to become Stanford’s head coach – had five assistant positions to fill.
During that hiring process, Thompson, a Walla Walla native and a Montana football player from 1999 to 2003, leaned on the returning staff members to help him make the decisions about who to hire.
“We have five new coaches, and we did a ton of research on them,” Thompson said. “We really got to know them. This business is all about relationships, and you hear that a lot, but that’s the only way you can build trust and confidence is by building relationships.”
Lamb, who was Southern Utah’s head coach from 2007 to 2015, is now at a Northern Colorado program that hasn’t had a winning record in Big Sky play since it joined the league in 2006. Everyone on his staff, he said, is someone that he’s either worked with, coached with or known otherwise.
“I think the people part of the business and the way I like to set up a program is way more important than the Xs and Os,” Lamb said. “I’m looking for the right kind of people that will treat our players right, that will treat the university and community correctly, and I think we have it.”
Once they are in place, Lamb said, he’s got to trust them to do what they need to do.
“The day-to-day details have to be filled in by those assistants,” he said. “There are too many. My brain capacity isn’t big enough to be on all those adjustments that need to happen minute by minute and day by day.”
That transition can be a challenge for head coaches who have been coordinators before, which describes all 12 of the Big Sky head football coaches.
That’s because the jobs simply are not the same.
“When you make the shift (to head coach), your tasks become much different,” third-year Montana State head coach Brent Vigen said. “What you realize pretty quickly is that the final decisions rest with you. Until you’re in that chair, you don’t really know what that means. It could be as simple as when we’re going to practice, to what we’re going to eat, to much more serious decisions – decisions that affect the future of the young men we coach and the direction of our program.”
Those, he said, are not so much matters that coordinators deal with in the same way.
UC Davis head coach Dan Hawkins said he likes to “macromanage” by communicating his vision of what the offense and defense need to do, but then he wants to let the coordinators execute it.
“I’ve been in those situations and I’ve been on both sides, so I’m very sensitive,” Hawkins said. “Just to give an example, in a four vertical package, some people like double benders in the middle, some people don’t. I like them. I’ve had coordinators that don’t like them. I’m not going to tell them to do it.
“I wouldn’t do it exactly how our coordinators do it, but there’s a big picture I’m concerned about, and I focus on that.”
Discussion is ‘mandated’
How to achieve the vision head coaches have laid out is, to many coaches, very much up for discussion in the right settings.
Bobby Hauck, now in his second stint as Montana’s head coach, has been a position coach and special teams coordinator in a number of programs. From 2015 to 2017, he coordinated San Diego State’s special teams units before returning to Montana in his current capacity in 2018.
Having been both a coordinator, Hauck said he understands the jobs are different and that he never had any trouble about who’s the boss. It’s a perspective he said has helped him as a head coach.
Disagreement, Hauck said, is crucial to the success of a program. But it has to be in the right setting.
“We can’t be afraid to have discussion. In fact, it’s mandated in our program,” he said. “… We don’t have discussions like that around our players. We’ll meet and plan until we get it where we want it and eventually you get to the decision point where you’ve got to say we’re doing it this way. Then, when we leave that room to go be with our players, we’re united. That’s mandated, too.”
Montana offensive lineman AJ Forbes heard Hauck explaining this at the summer Big Sky meetings. Asked if it was a fair assessment of how communication worked at Montana, Forbes said it was.
“Obviously, if coach Hauck is saying it, then it has to be true,” Forbes said, drawing a laugh from his coach. “I think our coaches do a great job of always being on the same page.”
But relationships don’t always work out well.
Asked whether he had a healthy relationship with his coordinators, Portland State coach Bruce Barnum said right now, yes he does.
“Ask me 12 months ago, no way,” Barnum said.
The Vikings went 4-7 last year and 3-5 in the Big Sky, including a 38-35 victory over Eastern Washington in Cheney.
“It’s critical because it affects the team,” Barnum said of those coordinator relationships. “It affects the locker room, the office. I would love to have more help with all the stuff we do, but I don’t, so we make do. We wear a lot of hats. And if I can’t trust those two coordinators, if you don’t have that trust or they turn on you or they’re going in a different direction, your team’s gone, your team’s split. And everything you’re working for takes two steps back.”
Barnum said that he likes very much where the Vikings are at now, with AC Patterson as offensive coordinator and Mark Rhea and Colin Fry co-coordinating the defense.
Patterson is 31 years old, one of the youngest coordinators in Division I. But Barnum trusts him. Patterson even knows the ages of Barnum’s adult children on demand.
It’s the sort of relationship coaches said is so important. And considering all the time they spend with each other not just during the football season but during the offseason, it’s no wonder how a strong personal relationship can translate into a good working one. So long, anyhow, as there is room for professional disagreement.
“When you’re staring at somebody, whether it’s a coach or a player, for five months, especially for coaches 14 to 17 hours a day, seven days a week in a 500-square-foot area, you must find ways to do it,” Best said, “and I’ve been fortunate for two decades to be part of a lot of staffs that get along really well.
“The juggling act is, if you get along too well, is there enough accountability? If you never get along, is there enough product there?”
Chapin said that during the offseason Best told him to be “a bigger jerk” to the head coach. Chapin also said that he has the freedom to do what he thinks is best for the offense.
It’s an offense that’s aiming to improve over its production from last season – when it ranked in the middle among Big Sky teams – and also to help the Eagles get back to their winning ways after a 3-8 record in 2022.
“I am really thankful for the relationship now,” Chapin said. “Our trust factor is through the roof.”
Spokesman-Review reporter Greg Woods contributed to this story.