BY BILL ORAM
The Salt Lake Tribune
Published Dec 18, 2010 06:58PM
His NFL career had ended before it ever started and here Bob Stephens faced the possibility the same might happen to his dream of coaching.
Stephens, 41, was hired last week as the new coach at Alta High School, one of the state’s elite programs, but long before that, he was forced to wonder if coaching was right for him.
His playing days came to an end when he stepped on a golf ball while jogging three days before reporting to the New England Patriots 1991 training camp. The team cut the center when he couldn’t pass a physical with a bum ankle.
They sent him back to BYU with a $3,000 signing bonus and nothing to do but finish his degree in wildlife and range resource management. And to leave football behind.
Two years of cleanly snapping the ball to Heisman Trophy winner Ty Detmer, he thought, might have been enough to make football a career.
Instead, of all the places for a former football great to wind up, here he was in Farmington, N.M., working to restore abandoned strip mines. But something was missing.
“Every fall would come around and I’d start getting the bug to be involved with football,” said Stephens, a hulking man who looks more like a rhinoceros wrestler than a science nerd.
Finally, in 1995, Stephens picked up the phone and called a local high school and asked if he could help with its football team, just volunteer stuff. Surely, a Division I starter who had a brief shot in the NFL could …
“No, we don’t need it,” they said.
That could have been it, an inglorious death to the nagging thought in the back of his mind that said he and football weren’t quite finished. But Stephens remembered how it felt when he lost the game the first time.
After another stint at BYU, where he earned a master’s degree, Stephens landed at Alta, coaching the offensive line, teaching wildlife biology — how many coaches can say that?— and basically being as happy as he’d ever been.
He won state championships in 2007 and 2008 coaching alongside Les Hamilton. But amid this year’s 4-7 season, Alta’s worst since 2004, Hamilton announced he was stepping down, leaving the door wide open for one of his top assistants.
“I always said, ‘If I’m going to be a head coach, I want it to be at Alta,’ ” Stephens said.
Stephens was informed Thursday that he was selected out of four finalists to replace Hamilton, who, in six years, compiled an intimidating 60-19 record. An announcement was made over the public-address system, and word began to ripple through the community. To parents, if there had to be change — and some say there did — Stephens brings the right kind. He’s easygoing but strict. He speaks of integrity and honor not as goals but as an expectation, equal to knowing the playbook.
“The parents are thrilled — and I can say that collectively,” said Kirsten Richards, whose son Steven will be a senior tight end next year.
For Stephens, not much changed this week. He continued the duties he assumed in November. Now, however, he can do them with ease, knowing it’s for his own benefit and that he isn’t just a placeholder.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/sports/50896103-77/stephens-alta-football-coach.html.csp
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