‘He’s more than capable’: Eastern Washington believes Kekoa Visperas can join line of standout quarterbacks

About 10 months ago, Kekoa Visperas walked off Roos Field, sat down to discuss his team’s performance and glowed.

He was coming off his first start as a college quarterback, and he had led the Eastern Washington football team to a 45-21 win over Northern Colorado.

The win lacked the significance of a playoff victory or one that might get a team into the postseason. But it was significant for a program that is used to winning, giving some hope that after a 3-8 season, the Eagles would return to their championship form.

And yet, it was just one start.

After an offseason spent studying, throwing and otherwise preparing for the 2023 season – which begins for the Eagles on Saturday against No. 2 North Dakota State at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis – Visperas is ready to prove his quality many times more.

“He’s more than capable,” EWU coach Aaron Best said earlier this week. “But we’ve also got to remember he’s only started one game, and he’s also up against about 14 other quarterbacks who’ve been pretty damn good around here.”

To be a quarterback at Eastern Washington seems to require a recognition of the excellence that came before. It is part of how the Eagles recruit athletes to play that position. And it is part of what drives Visperas.

He goes back and watches video of players like Eric Barriere and Vernon Adams Jr. “all the time,” he said. There’s plenty for him to draw from watching what they did.

But since he became the de facto starting quarterback for this team at the end of last season – when, for a time, he was the only quarterback officially on the roster – Visperas has been acting the part of the next quarterback to start at Eastern.

What that part entails is something Visperas said he didn’t fully understand when he first arrived in Cheney after graduating from Bethel High School in Spanaway, Washington, in 2021.

“As a freshman, I didn’t know all the pieces and bits of what the college game is about,” Visperas said after Saturday’s intrasquad scrimmage. “Now, as I progress and get older, it’s cool to almost put myself in their shoes. I see life from the same lens.

“It’s just a lifestyle. Being a quarterback is a lifestyle, and you have to carry that on and off the field. Having the role that I do now, there’s a lot that I can understand because of it.”

One takeaway he had from watching Barriere – who won the Walter Payton Award following the 2021 season recognizing him as the FCS’ best offensive player – was that there’s a lot that isn’t mandatory that a starting quarterback still needs to do. One thing is that he must watch a lot of film.

“You look at how much he’s grown as a leader,” EWU senior receiver Jakobie James said. “He was watching film on North Dakota State in January. The amount of hours we spent together – thousands of hours – it’s ridiculous.”

Like many receivers on the Eastern roster, James played with Barriere. He caught a pair of touchdown passes from him in the team’s most recent playoff game, a 57-41 loss to Montana after the 2021 season.

“(Barriere) was so good at not only saying the right things at the right time but doing the right things at the right time and being a spark for our offense,” James said. “I believe in Kekoa. He is mentally tough. He’s physically tough.”

James said he has seen Visperas grow from being quiet to more vocal, bringing the team together and saying the right things.

“He’s 100%, 110% ready,” James said.

A quick study

Like many members of the 2021 high school graduating class, Visperas didn’t have the recruiting or playing opportunities that those in previous classes did.

Mark Iddins first met Visperas when he was the head football coach at Bethel. Iddins, who also played quarterback at Montana State, is now the athletic director at Olympia High School.

Iddins said Visperas had a quiet demeanor at first, but immediately he recognized the skill set.

“Right when he came over he picked things up almost instantly,” Iddins said .

Visperas started at quarterback in the team’s first game, which was played at what was then called CenturyLink Field in Seattle against Kennedy Catholic. Bethel lost 32-27 as Sam Huard – then a Washington Huskies recruit who now plays for Cal Poly – threw for 313 yards and four touchdowns.

But Iddins could tell Visperas wasn’t intimidated.

“The moment was never too big for him, which was the great thing about him,” Iddins said. “I always called him a young Russell Wilson because that’s what he reminded me of. He threw this effortless deep ball that looked so great in the air. Just perfect. But he could also take off and run.”

The first college to reach out to Visperas, he said, was Eastern, and it was safeties coach Zach Bruce who did so, profiling Visperas as a defensive back. Later, though, after a regional competition it was EWU’s offensive coordinator at the time, Ian Shoemaker, who contacted Visperas. He wanted Visperas to be a quarterback.

Bethel’s 2020-21 season was shortened to five games, which didn’t give teams much more film on him or on any of the other football teams who played an incomplete season that school year. But the pandemic limitations also meant that players couldn’t go to as many camps or training sessions, and so coaches were mostly limited to other modes of recruiting.

“Coaches couldn’t even see us,” Visperas said. “The pieces leading up to seasons, those are prime times to be able to get looked at and for coaches to come onto your campus and meet you in person and see you practice.”

Many other 2021 high school graduates could tell the same story, an intriguing element to the season that is just now beginning.

An ‘unflappable’ player

Visperas redshirted his freshman season in fall 2021. Last year, he appeared in five games, including a fourth-quarter scoring drive that he capped with a 25-yard rushing touchdown in a 52-17 loss to the Florida Gators.

He played an entire half in mid-November at Montana, completing 9 of 12 passes for 69 yards and his first touchdown pass: a 6-yard throw and catch to Blake Gobel.

Visperas followed that up with a 17-for-21 effort at home against Northern Colorado – his first game action at Roos Field – throwing for 235 yards and two touchdowns. He also rushed seven times for 33 yards and another touchdown.

This weekend, 2½ years after graduating from high school – and with three years of eligibility remaining – Visperas has the chance to lead the Eagles back to a winning season.

Best called Visperas “an unflappable player” whom he himself leans on when he needs someone else to make him a bit more unflappable.

But Best also cautioned against making direct comparisons to the quarterbacks who came before Visperas at Eastern.

Because for all the work and time Visperas has spent learning from and studying those players, he is not Barriere. He is not Adams . And that’s one reason why Visperas chose to wear No. 0 – which no other quarterback at Eastern has worn – instead of the No. 3 worn by Barriere and Adams.

“No matter how he plays, it’s going to be, ‘Well, did that compare to (quarterback) A, B, C, D?’ ” Best said. “It’s Kekoa. That’s who he wants to be, and that’s who he intends to be. But there’s a long lineage of quarterbacks that he knows have put up gaudy numbers here, that have been nationally respected, and he wants to be the next one.

“But it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to happen over the course of his career, and I think he’s embarking on his journey. It started against Northern Colorado, but the guts of his journey really start this Saturday as we go forward.”