Ask Garth Hall how he became athletic director at Ricks College and he'll say he had no idea it would happen, and for that matter, no intention. It just sort of occurred all at once and over two decades, by plan and by accident. It happened because, well, it was supposed to.
After living in North Carolina, Utah, Oregon and Louisiana, and after turning down an offer to be the head football coach at Ricks College two decades earlier, he was sure of one thing: He wouldn't ever work in Rexburg. If not the last job he was interested in, it was the last legal one. For a guy who grew up in Salt Lake City and attended Highland High and later lived all over the nation, settling in a community where you might smell manure from a nearby field wasn't an obvious choice."Where I've been, it's kind of ironic I'd be in Rexburg, Idaho," says Hall.
Hall's travels, however, were part of the reason he was hired in September as the A.D. at the LDS-owned junior college. He coached in the Metro, Atlantic Coast, Big Sky, Pac-10 and Western Athletic conferences. He was an assistant football coach at USU, Wake Forest, BYU, Tulane, Oregon State and head coach at Idaho State. He's lived in Salt Lake City, Orem, Winston-Salem, New Orleans, Pocatello and Corvallis. For a man who has coached in the big conferences, junior college athletic administration didn't seem a likely career move.
"I thought for a long time that it was all happening at the big stadiums," says Hall. "But where I am, for me, this is a perfect place."
Some would disagree. Hall is at a school where the shortest football road trip is a 12-hour bus ride. They fly to games, but only if the airfares make it cheaper than driving. Publicity is nil. If you want to read up on the Vikings, you may have to wait awhile - the Rexburg Standard-Journal publishes twice a week. The game story will be tucked in there along with a picture of the new county fire engine.
It's college sports on a budget.
Hall spent his share of time in big programs. He began as an assistant at Utah State. From there he moved on to an assistant's job at Wake Forest. He made the longest stop of his career at BYU, staying for nine years as an assistant. Fortunately for him, and in part because of him, he was with the BYU program as it was beginning to emerge. He was there on the sidelines when Marc Wilson threw the scoring pass to beat Texas A&M. He was also there when Jim McMahon told his teammates to "get in the end zone, I'm throwing it up" on the final play in Holiday Bowl III.
Still, when an opportunity came to leave for Tulane, he was gone.
"I was getting too comfortable," he says.
While at BYU he picked up his Ed.D in athletic administration, interviewing dozens of athletic administrators and coaches. But at that date, he still hadn't gotten coaching out of his system. After three years at Tulane, he moved on to Idaho State as the head man. Struggling with an underfunded program, his contract wasn't renewed after four years. He moved to Oregon State as an assistant coach.
Coaching at Idaho State, where there were limited funds, got Hall again thinking about administration and a purer form of college sports. His experience at Oregon State only served to cement his opinion that major college sports were out of control. "In the mid-'80s I started to see a shift," says Hall. "The questions used to be `Will he have tutors?' and `Is the scholarship guaranteed?' Then it started to change. The questions were `How many tickets can I get?' and `Are you going to push him for all-American?' It all got distorted."
After leaving OSU, he went back to Orem and began a sports consulting business. But while attending a Ricks College baseball game this year, watching his son play, an acquaintance noted the A.D.'s job was opening and told Hall he should apply. "I didn't think anything of it," he says.
But soon he got thinking that a junior college job could include the best parts of athletics: no big budgets, no pampered athletes, no jammed streets and parking lots. Best of all, he says, he saw "a chance to have an influence on their lives."
Before he was finished weighing the options he had sold himself. It was all over but joining the Rexburg Cattlemen's Association and buying a pickup.
Since then, Hall has seen nothing to dissuade him. He's building a house on the outskirts of town. He has a five-minute drive to work. People who barely remember his name are offering to help him move into his home.
"This," he says, "is what I was born and bred to do."
It just took him a long time to realize it.