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.
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on UW sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com /huskiesblog
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