Worst Seat In The House: The annual visit

A couple of weeks ago the Eastern Washington University Eagle football coaches came to Ritzville for their annual visit. The Ritzville Lions Club has hosted the Eagle coaches for 25 years or so.

A few years ago I got the chance to golf with Head Coach Beau Baldwin and Offensive Coordinator (OC) Zak Hill. Hill has since taken a job as OC for the Boise State Broncos and Baldwin is now the OC for the California Golden Bears.

This year I got to golf with Head Coach Aaron Best and the new Eagle OC, Ian Shoemaker. Shoemaker was the head coach at Central Washington University last year.

Shoemaker has a lot of experience coaching at several different collegiate levels and has earned the respect of Best. Shoemaker and Best are a real kick to golf with and you better have thick skin because they aren’t afraid to slip in a dig or two if you happen to mess up on a few shots. Fortunately I have thick skin.

The fourth in our group, Tug is a good friend from the west side of the state that I get to see at EWU football games in the fall. He was in town since his daughter was graduating from Eastern a few days later. Just letting you know, Tug out-golfed us all.

I enjoyed the visit with Coach Shoe and getting his perspective on the returning players, especially QB Eric Barriere. The one thing that I got from him was that he wasn’t going to change the offense that the Eagles ran last year. He said it is a lot easier for him to adapt to the Eagle offense than trying to get all of the team to learn his offense. In time there will be a play or two that Coach Shoe will implement which is a ton easier than changing every play. Coach Shoe has enough experience and has seen enough film to know what the Eags are doing.

Coach Best has a great sense of humor and he said that a fair amount of people were on the fence about a lineman becoming the head man. He also said many were questioning his wanting to run the ball more as opposed to Baldwin’s offense that passed a lot. When his first team went 7-4 and missed out on the playoffs, which I thought was a big snub by the NCAA, some of those fans may have felt that the good old days of EWU football were waning.

I told him that I was happy with the offense because we often got into trouble scoring too early with the pass on most every down and the defense spending so much time on the field.

I also told him I’d seen a lot of teams and the good teams had good lines and those that weren’t so great were lacking a good line. In other words good lines need good coaching. Best and Shoe agreed with those profound words of wisdom!

Later on I joked with Best and said, “I know you can’t hear the fans in my area who are screaming at you for some of the stupid plays that are called. But just to let you know, they yelled the same things at Baldwin.” Best just smiled and said, “That’s great!”

In Best’s second year the Eagles played in the NCAA National Championship game, coming up a couple of TDs short of victory but North Dakota State had that effect on every team they played this year. This will be another fun season at Cheney and my ticket has been secured for another year.

The Ritzville Lions appreciate the EWU Eagle coaches coming to Ritzville and the coaches have a great time too. We hope this visit continues for a long time.