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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Joe Cool

From his Days Coaching at the Youth, Div. III And Div. II Levels, Montana\'s Joe Glenn has been intent on building something big.
by: Tony Jackson
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For the record, the song was called, "In Heaven, There is No Beer." And the first time he heard it being belted out by a senior citizens band from the local Kiwanis club on that late summer day in 1989, Joe Glenn began to realize just how much work he had ahead of him.

It was his first game as head football coach at the University ofNorthern Colorado, and although the afternoon would end in a narrow victory over Idaho State, it was a truly humbling experience. It had been seven years since the Bears' last winning season, and at least that long since anyone had actually cared. The team played in a cramped, aging stadium, a mile away from campus, and it played before an audience that did not include cheerleaders, a band or, for that matter, much of anybody else.

Glenn, who had grown up in Lincoln, Neb., in the shadow of Memorial Stadium, Bob Devaney and the Cornhusker mystique, had a different view of the way a college football program should be. It was a view that was not limited to helmets and shoulder pads and snap counts.

"One of the first things I did was talk to the administration about bringing in a spirit band and a homecoming parade," Glenn says. "I remember my first game as head coach here, we had about 300 people in there. I knew what I wanted to try to do. I believed in my ability to coach football, but I also wanted to put some people in the seats and build some school pride, some school spirit."

As Glenn tells the story, he is seated in the middle of a Greeley, Colo., watering hole, one the UNC athletic department has rented out for the morning. The room is filled with football players, each of them watching the televised announcement of the Division II playoff field. There is little doubt that they will get one and probably two home games, games that will be played at their $4 million on-campus home known as Nottingham Field. It opened in 1995, and the Bears have lost only two games there since. During its first four seasons, the team brought home two national championships.

Less than a month later, the landscape at UNC would changedrastically. The Bears would lose at Nottingham for just the second time, to defending champion Northwest Missouri State in the second round. And Glenn would accept the head coaching position at the University of Montana, a I-AA school, leaving longtime offensive coordinator Kay Dalton to take the reigns in Greeley.

But Glenn's impact will be felt for years to come. He will be

forever known as the man who took Northern Colorado to the proverbial next level. The complete metamorphosis took barely a decade.

Glenn's boundless optimism, which makes him as adept in his official role as football coach as it does in his unofficial one as campus spirit committee chairman, can be traced to his Nebraska roots. He was one of a dozen children, with five older siblings and six younger ones. His father, Pat, contracted Parkinson's disease at a young age, leaving his wife, Dorothy, to effectively raise the nine children still living at home by herself.

"She was the biggest influence on my life, no doubt," Glenn says. "Just her strength and determination. She worked so hard to put all of us through school, and she herself worked her way to the top and wound up as the head of records for the State Hospital of Nebraska. She had to learn how to take full advantage of the strengths that she had, and that was a lesson she passed down to us."

By the time Glenn landed his first head coaching job, at DoaneCollege in Nebraska at the age of 27, it was a lesson he had yet to fully learn.

Glenn had a successful career as a high school quarterback at Pius X High School in Lincoln, leading his team to an undefeated season his senior year. But his dreams of wearing Cornhusker Red, just as his father had done three decades earlier, were dashed by a body that never grew larger than 155 pounds. He wound up at Division II South Dakota, a decision he now says was one of the best he ever made.

"I was looking for a school where I could get a lot of help because of my financial deal," Glenn says. "I had an excellent experience there. After that, I had a two-year commitment (ROTC commission) in the army, and fortunately, I never had to go to the war.

"I tell people I did a great job keeping the North Vietnamese out of Fort Gordon (Ga.) and Fort Leavenworth (Kan.)."

While marking time in those outposts, he was dreaming of a career coaching football, a career that finally began when he returned to his alma mater as running backs coach in 1974. A year later, he was in the same position at Northern Arizona. And after one season there, he got wind of a head coaching job that had just opened up at Doane, a private school just 24 miles from Lincoln.

"I applied for it kind of as a joke," Glenn says. "But I turned out to be just what they were looking for. I was a guy from the area, and I had kind of a private school upbringing.

"I wound up staying at Doane for four years."

Along the way, he found himself. At first, Glenn said, he adhered to the conventional idea of what a football coach should be. Every afternoon, he would walk out to the practice field with his baseball cap pulled low over his head, whistle in mouth, ready to lay down the law.

"As I look back, I wish I would've utilized more of my own personality instead of trying so hard," he says. "My priorities were a little different then.

"I think with years, I've mellowed out. I see myself as more of a father-figure now, more of a mentor in the kids' lives, a guy who can make a difference if they will let me. At that time, it was all about winning and losing, and I lost touch with who I am."

At the same time, though, it was everything a job at a Division III school can be: a stepping stone, a starting point and a learning experience.

"I had to do everything, from turning off the lights at the practice field to washing the uniforms," Glenn says. "My wife was my equipment manager.

"But you know, I learned so much there. We had to hire our ownofficials and draw up our own budget. The thing I had to learn was how to delegate — to give somebody a job and let them do it, and just try to give them whatever support they needed. You just couldn't be a micromanager."

Glenn went 21-18 in those four years, and then moved on to the University of Montana as offensive coordinator. But after six years, the entire staff was let go. Glenn decided that his coaching career was over, a decision he would reverse a year later.

"It just devastated me," he says. "We had a great coaching staff, a great bunch of guys, and we were moving into a new stadium the next year. We had some good things going, and they didn't give us the opportunity to see it through, even for one more year.

"I was out of football during the '86 season, and I was the offensive coordinator for a youth league team in Missoula — just a bunch of kids. They were fifth- and sixth-graders. It really kick-started me again. It was shortly after that when I heard about the quarterbacks coach's job (at UNC)."

With that, Glenn joined the staff of Ron Simonson at UNC. And when Simonson abruptly resigned just before the '89 season, Glenn, who only days earlier had accepted a position with the British Columbia Lions of the CFL, instead chose to remain in Greeley as the new head coach, one with visions of grandeur for a struggling program.

By that time, of course, his approach to coaching had changed dramatically since that first day on the job at Doane. Glenn already had a defensive coordinator in place in Mike Breske, and his first move was to bring in Dalton, a Colorado legend, to run the offense. Dalton had spent 14 seasons as an assistant in the NFL and five more at the NCAA Division I level.

More than a decade later, both were still in Greeley with Glenn (Breske will join Glenn at Montana). And they were afforded a degree of autonomy that took some players aback at first.

"I came in as a freshman, and I didn't know what to expect on the college level," says Corte McGuffey, the Bears' starting quarterback and winner of the 1999 Harlon Hill Award. "I think most college head coaches, you see them on the sideline, and they've got the headset on, and they're yelling and screaming. He's just the opposite. What I found here was that Joe doesn't do a whole lot of coaching.

"I called my dad and told him how the head coach didn't do anything, but my dad told me that he would've given anything to play for a coach like that. He said he had a college coach that was always sticking his nose into everything.

"Now, I think Coach Glenn is responsible for probably 100 percent of our success. He's done a great job. He kind of just stays out of it, and I think that works so well for this coaching staff. They all get along so well together. To see him so relaxed out there on gameday, it relaxes the rest of us."

After all, if there was one lesson that Dorothy Glenn had taught Joe, the sixth of her 12 children, it was to be himself. And her son has turned that into an art form, whether it be in his uncanny ability to delegate or his annual homecoming game tradition of having the players form a tunnel through which the band runs onto the field.

"You always live and learn from your experiences," Glenn says. "But we follow pretty much the same blueprint we always have. Since I got here, I've pretty much stayed with Colorado kids and tried to recruit primarily in our state. And I also feel that a key to our success has been the stability of our coaching staff. Six of us have 11 seasons together. Everybody knows their job, and everybody knows their responsibilities.

"If you give me credit for anything, give me credit for surrounding myself with a great coaching staff."






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