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One thing that helped my transition is that I knew I had an experienced quarterback. He can teach me a thing or two. – Justin Waltersheid said of quarterback Ammon Olsen.
Justin Waltersheid, a former college football player and son of a former NFL player, managed to leave the game behind for a time. He went into the mortgage business. Made good money, too, which was the point.
He lasted all of eight months. He quit his high-paying job, and, at the relatively late age of 28, became a starving football coach — as in zero income.
That was just seven years ago and he has made a hurried climb up the ladder of the coaching business ever since, although the last step was hardly expected. On Oct. 5 he reported to work as the assistant coach over wide receivers and special teams at Southern Utah University and a few minutes later he was the offensive coordinator — four games into the current season.
The team’s offensive coordinator to that point had been Gary Crowton, the vagabond coach who treats coaching jobs like bus stops. He resigned his post citing “personal reasons,” and, just like that, Walterscheid was the new OC and Crowton was living in a basement in Corvallis, Oregon, and advising Oregon State’s offense, whatever that means.
“I was blindsided,” Walterscheid says. “I don’t think anybody expected it.”
Walterscheid, given a bye week to prepare, gave himself a crash course in total offense. He knew the passing game, but, in his words, “I had to dig into learning pass protections and the run game and the techniques of the O-line. I got a quick O-line clinic from (offensive line coaches James Martinez and Aaron Fernandez).”
As Walterscheid notes, not many coaches become offensive coordinators without having an off-season and a training camp to prepare. Two weeks later he made his OC debut. SUU beat Sacramento State 44-0 — the identical score of the Thunderbirds’ win over Weber State in their previous game under Crowton. The T-Birds, who came within three points of upsetting Utah State in the season-opener, have won four games in a row by a combined score of 173-10.
Walterscheid has made only minor tweaks in the offense since having the OC job fall into his lap. He has created more specialized personnel groups, even a bigger, heavier lineup for rain games, but beyond that, he says, “To make a major change now would not benefit anyone in this situation.”
Walterscheid grew up around football. His father Lenny was a standout defensive back at Southern Utah and went on to have an eight-year career in the NFL, six with the Chicago Bears, two with the Buffalo Bills. As a boy he was befriended by Walter Payton, Jim McMahon, Richard Dent, current Rams coach Jeff Fisher and former Vikings coach Leslie Frazier.
He starred for SUU as a kick returner and receiver, and then accepted an invitation to the Denver Broncos training camp. After being cut by Denver, he played briefly for the Arizona Rattlers of the Arena League, but was having doubts about his occupation.
“I was working hard and not making any money,” he says. “I was missing out on opportunities.”
He quit football and found a job in the home-loan businesss. “I made great money but after eight months I realized I wasn’t happy,” he says. “Something was missing. I wanted to find a way back into football.”
That meant coaching. Aaron Roderick, an assistant at Utah, warned him, “Be prepared to earn little to no money for three to four years.” With a wife and child, he had no income the next two years while serving as a graduate assistant at Weber State and Utah. To hasten his education, he used his dad’s NFL connections to serve summer internships with Frazier and Fisher. Walterscheid got his big break in 2010 when Roderick put in a word with SUU head coach Ed Lamb, who gave him his first paying job in coaching.
Five years later, Walterscheid finds himself overseeing the offense at SUU, a rising FCS football school with 45 native Utahns on the roster. The Thunderbirds are 4-2 and boast three defensive players who are getting daily looks from NFL scouts — James Cowser, Miles Killebrew and LeShaun Sims — plus a good quarterback in Ammon Olsen, who threw for 421 yards and a school record-tying five touchdowns last week.
“One thing that helped my transition is that I knew I had an experienced quarterback,” says Walterscheid of Olsen, a senior who transferred from BYU a couple years ago. “He can teach me a thing or two.”
Like everyone else, Olsen was stunned by the in-season departure of his position coach and mentor. “That threw me for a loop,” he says. “I had worked closely with him. I honestly don’t know what is going on. But (Crowton) knew we’d be OK.”
Crowton texted Olsen after his last outing to offer him congratulations. “We still text and talk quite a bit,” says Olsen.
Crowton’s departure seemed even stranger when it was reported two weeks later that he was in Corvallis and serving as an “offensive consultant” for the Oregon State football team. According to SUU athletic director Jason Butikofer, who communicates with Crowton frequently, Crowton is living in the basement of his niece, Lindsay McGiven, whose husband, Kevin McGiven, is OSU’s quarterback coach.
“Gary said he is not getting paid and that’s it’s all on an informal basis,” says Butikofer.
Crowton has continued to refuse all interview requests.
Meanwhile, the Thunderbirds have moved on, with Walterscheid running the offense, and so far the Thunderbirds have thrived.
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com