UW FB: SARKISIAN WENT AFTER HUSKY JOB ‘FULL FLEDGED’
By John Boyle
HeraldNet
20081209/SPORTS/712099914/1093/SPORTS06
Dec 9 2008
WA
SEATTLE — Had Steve Sarkisian been more adept at hitting a slider,
Washington almost certainly would have introduced a different football
coach Monday.
Sarkisian, who Monday was announced as Tyrone Willingham’s successor
at Washington, first went to college at USC as a baseball player
after graduating from Southern California’s West Torrance High School.
But as a freshman at USC, Sarkisian quickly discovered that hitting
college pitching was a little more difficult that it was at the high
school level.
"They didn’t throw [sliders] in high school," he said. "I was a pretty
good hitter in high school."
Sarkisian transferred to El Camino Junior College where he played
baseball for a season and football for two years, and eventually
ended up as the quarterback at Brigham Young University. That set
Sarkisian down a path that eventually led to becoming a football
coach, and being introduced to Husky fans as the next head coach at
Washington while his wife, Stephanie, and their three kids looked on.
After BYU, Sarkisian and Stephanie, who met through mutual friends
as seniors in high school — she went to rival Torrance High — were
married right before he began his three-year career in the Canadian
Football league. Stephanie Sarkisian said she likes to tell people
they went on a five-month honeymoon to Saskatchewan.
Sarkisian spent time working as a substitute teacher during his CFL
offseasons, then decided to look into coaching when his playing career
ended. He ended up getting his first coaching job back at El Camino
coaching quarterbacks in 2000, and the following year was able to
get a job at USC as a graduate assistant.
"I was a little bit into the dotcom world for a little bit and coaching
junior college football, and I knew right then that I wanted to be a
football coach," he said. "(Pete Carroll’s) first year (at USC), I got
an opportunity to be a graduate assistant, and bit the bullet a little
bit financially to do it, and from that moment I’ve never looked back."
Sarkisian continued coaching at USC under Carroll until he joined
the Raiders for a season as the team’s quarterbacks coach. Sarkisian
returned to USC in 2005, then was a candidate for the Raiders’ head
coaching job two seasons ago before he turned Oakland down. Given a
chance to pursue the Washington job, however, Sarkisian wasn’t going
to back away from another head coaching opportunity.
"When I was growing up, this was Rose Bowls, this was conference
championships, this was national championships, and that’s all I ever
knew it as," said Sarkisian, the youngest of seven children born to
an Armenian father and an Irish Catholic mother. "Where this program
was the last few years, I knew it was capable of much more than that,
so when this opportunity arose, I knew it was something I wanted to
get on as quickly as possible. . . It was a no brainer to me. I did
everything in my power to try to go get this job. I went after this
thing full fledged. I wanted to be here more so than anywhere else
in the world. Fortunately for me, it worked out."
Based on first impressions anyway, Washington’s new head coach will
be a lot different than his predecessor. Sarkisian won over the fans
quickly during Monday’s press conference — though his 3-year-old son
Brady, who wore a purple No. 10 jersey, and 6-year-old daughter Ashley,
who wore a UW cheerleading outfit, nearly stole the spotlight from
dad as they played on stage next to the podium — in part because he
mentioned his desire to open practices to fans, boosters and media, a
drastically different approach than the one taken by Tyrone Willingham.
An open, more relaxed program would be in line with what Sarkisian
knows from his time coaching at USC. And While Sarkisian has learned
a lot under Carroll and will draw obvious comparisons to his former
boss, he stressed that he is a different coach than Carroll.
"There’s obviously a lot I learned, his style, and there’s other things
I took from other people, but I am my own person," Sarkisian said. "I’m
not going to be Pete Carroll. I’m going to be Steve Sarkisian to the
best of my ability, and hopefully that’s good enough to get it back
to where we need to be."
And where Sarkisian thinks the Huskies need to be is back at the top
of the Pac-10, even if that means going through his former team to
get there.
"I owe him dearly," Sarkisian said of Carroll. "But that doesn’t mean
I don’t want to go out and beat him in our third game next season."
If he can succeed in that, Husky fans will certainly be glad that
Sarkisian couldn’t hit a slider 16 years ago.