BEHIND THE DESK
Landing first coaching job is never easy
By Barry Alvarez
UW Director of Athletics
Jake Sprague was a very good Big Ten football player. But, to be honest, I would have never suspected that he would want to be a coach, or would coach, when he was playing for us.
Some players grow up in coaching families. They’ve been around it and they know how a coach thinks on a daily basis. You’d expect that they would want to coach. They have it in their blood.
Others know what they want to do and become students of the game. I was that way.
After he went out and tried his hand at pro ball, Jake came back here and got some experience as a graduate assistant with the defensive line, along with working in quality control.
I thought he did a very good job. And it’s a credit to Jake that he was able to make that jump from GA to a college level staff at South Dakota, where he has been an assistant the last four seasons.
Kevin Kane took a similar route. He worked here as a graduate assistant for Dave Doeren and when Dave took over the Northern Illinois program, he hired Kevin as a full-time assistant on his staff.
I was a GA for Monte Kiffin at Nebraska. I was coaching, going to school full-time to get my master’s degree and walking a beat for the Lincoln police department.
On a typical school day, I would attend class in the morning and coach football in the afternoon. Right after practice, I would go home, grab something to eat and head out to walk the beat as a cop.
When you’re young, you have a lot of energy.
My first full-time job was at Lincoln Northeast High School. I made $7,500.
It’s hard to get that first job, it really is.
And it’s hard to get into college coaching. You’ve got to get your foot in the door, and then you’ve got to prove you can recruit, and then you start building contacts.
I was the first high school coach that Hayden Fry hired at Iowa.
Hayden liked to hire guys who had been high school teachers and high school coaches because they had to learn how to teach first and there was a carry-over to coaching.
That was one of the mistakes that I made when I took the Wisconsin job.
I should have hired a high school coach for my first staff.
But I thought I needed to retain some guys who had Wisconsin backgrounds. Instead, I should have been looking for a highly-regarded high school coach that would have sent a strong message.
It’s hard, almost impossible, today to get from high school to a college job. Very few head coaches are going to hire someone out of high school and give them a full-time position.
They’ve eliminated the old part-time coach.
That’s how Frank Solich got started.
As a profession, I think it’s important that we’re able to feed young guys into the system so that we can break them into coaching; a young guy like Jake Sprague.
