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Utah State interim head coach Nate Dreiling coaches his team during fall camp in Logan. | Utah State Athletics
It is late in the summer of 2009 and Pittsburg State — a Division II program based in southeastern Kansas — has just begun fall practices ahead of the upcoming football season.
As the Gorillas defensive coordinator, Dave Wiemers stands at one end of Carnie Smith Stadium working with the first team defense and expectations are high.
Pittsburg State isn’t just any old DII program. It is the winningest football program in DII history, with three national championships won at that point in time, and the Gorillas are coming off a 2008 season in which they won 11 games and advanced to the second round of the DII playoffs.
And yet, Wiemers, by his own admission, is distracted. Highly distracted.
On the opposite end of the field, Wiemers’ gaze is drawn to a true freshman linebacker on the work team. It’s not because of any spectacular plays he’s making or incredible feats of athleticism on display. No, it is because this newcomer to college football is coaching, actively coaching the entire work team as an 18-year old, and doing it well.
“It was pretty amazing,” Wiemers, now a defensive analyst at Utah State, recalls. “I spent half the practice watching him, and thought to myself, ‘Why aren’t we playing him?’”
That 18 year-old linebacker was Nate Dreiling.
Fifteen years later, Dreiling is now the interim head coach at Utah State. At 33, he is the youngest head coach at the FBS level after taking over the Aggies’ job in July following the firing of Blake Anderson.
The Aggies have been mired in mediocrity of late, making the job anything but easy. USU has finished 6-7 in each of the last two seasons and has won more than seven games just once in the last five years (that outlier season was…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nate-dreiling-man-utah-state-010008436.html
Author : Deseret News
Publish date : 2024-08-25 01:00:08
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