FOOTBALL, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY
Riders’ new GM talks about the important things in his life
Jeremy O’Day appreciated the Riders and lions on the same day.
On Jan. 18 — only a few hours after being named the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ general manager and vice-president of football operations — O’Day watched his 11-yearold daughter Alyssa play the role of a villager in a local production of The Lion King.
“I was sitting there thinking, ‘I didn’t expect this to be exactly what happened after I was hired as the GM,’ but it was kind of fitting,” recalls O’Day, a dedicated husband (to Dana), father (to three kids) and Roughrider (since 1999).
“I looked down at my phone and I had 200 messages to reply back to and I was watching The Lion King. It was kind of relaxing, to be honest with you, because I turned off my phone and I got to watch. She did great.”
So did a proud father, who does his utmost to balance his vocation and personal life — thereby emulating his parents, Chuck and Judy.
“One thing I always appreciated is that I can’t remember a game when my parents weren’t there,” says O’Day, flashing back to his childhood in Lockport, N.Y., and his time with the football program at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. “It’s something that stuck with me for a long time — just having your parents at the game and how important it is. Something I try to do as best I can now is to make it to all the events with my kids.
“When I was in college, we had a game at Carson-Newman, which is 11 or 12 hours away from Edinboro (in Jefferson City, Tenn.). Carson-Newman beat the heck out of us and it wasn’t even close. I was walking off the field, going to the bus, and, sure enough, there’s my mom. She had driven half a day to watch me play Carson-Newman. I had no idea. She didn’t tell me she was coming, and she just showed up.”
O’Day, 44, now applies the same mindset to the activities of his son Tyson (who is 14), and daughters Brooklyn (12) and Alyssa.
“The other day, I went and watched my son play basketball,” O’Day says. “I was running behind by a couple of minutes. I got to the game and the score was 3-0 for my son’s team, so I thought, ‘The game just started. It’s not really a big deal. I didn’t miss anything.’
“Sure enough, after the first timeout, my son looked over at me and said, ‘I scored the first basket.’ It bothered me that I missed it, but what bothered me even more is that he knew I had missed it, because he told me. When he made the shot, he looked around and wanted to see if I was there.
“Thankfully, there was a game the other day and he made the first basket again, and I was there. He looked and saw me.”
And now, the eyes of the entire Rider Nation are on Jeremy O’Day.
O’Day had yet to take up contact football — at which he excelled in the CFL for 14 seasons — when he signed his first autograph.
“I had a really great Little League baseball coach — Bob Stoll,” O’Day recalls. “He was really impactful and really a great person.
“I remember he asked me for my autograph when I was about 10 or 11 years old. He said, ‘I’m going to get your autograph now, because you’re going to be a star.’”
At the time, O’Day was a burly slugger and a self-described “sports kid.”
“I would rather go out and play catch and throw the ball at the wall or shoot baskets or throw the football around — anything to do with sports at all, whether it was going to the park to play pick-up games,” he says.
“When I was in elementary school, I’d stare out the window on days when it was cloudy and pray that it wouldn’t rain so that we could play our baseball games. I was always thinking about sports and the game that night.”
When he wasn’t playing sports, he was watching them.
He pored over baseball cards, for example, and read the players’ statistics on the back. He spent countless hours looking at the rosters of teams he followed as a fan or opposed as an athlete.
“Growing up in Lockport, New York, we were Buffalo Bills fans, and that was actually when they were going to four straight Super Bowls and they had Jim Kelly at quarterback and a lot of Hall of Famers,” O’Day says. “There was excitement around the Bills and the NFL. We’d go to the odd game and I’d be the kid with binoculars, watching one-on-one matchups when everyone else was watching the ball.”
O’Day’s first one-on-one matchup occurred when he was in Grade 9 and junior high school. While in Grade 11 at Lockport High School, he began blossoming as a player, to the extent that college scouts took notice.
“It was at that point that I decided I should focus on football and lifting weights,” O’Day says.
The workouts often included his older brother, Jon, who played basketball at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.
“He was someone I always looked up to, because I saw him doing well and he was a good athlete, and still is,” O’Day says. “He was a role model. As we got older, he went and played college basketball and we’d go and watch all his games, and he’d always come and watch my football games.
“He’s just a great brother. He ended up buying a video camera when they first came out and he would record all of my football games. To this day, I still have all the tapes, and I throw them in every once in a while and laugh.
“When I got to college, he would always send me handwritten letters with words of encouragement, telling me to keep working hard and to keep lifting weights. I still have those letters. I probably bring them out and read them once a year, just to get perspective.
“He would be writing me from his college and he would always put 20 bucks in there and tell me to get something. I don’t know if he really knew what he was doing at the time or if he was just being a good brother, but it meant a lot. My mom and dad didn’t even know until much later down the road that he was even doing it.”
O’Day debuted with the Edinboro football team in 1993 and helped the Fighting Scots register a 30-12 record over four years. Over that span, Edinboro participated in the NCAA Division 2 playoffs in 1993 and 1995.
A Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference all-star at tackle (in 1994 and 1996) and guard (1995), he performed at a level that would be honoured in 2008 with induction into the Edinboro University Athletics Hall of Fame.
North of the border, he was an especially intriguing prospect from the moment it became known to CFL types that his parents were born in Kitchener, Ont., meaning he would be classified a Canadian.
The Toronto Argonauts brass — head coach Don Matthews, general manager Eric Tillman and director of Canadian scouting Nick Volpe — took notice and selected O’Day in Round 2 of the CFL’s 1997 supplemental draft. As a result, the Argos forfeited a second-round pick in 1998.
“Forfeited?” Tillman says, laughing. “Heck, ‘invested’ is the right word. We invested wisely in a player who went on to become a rock-solid player, as we expected. If necessary, we were going to bid a future Number 1 pick to get Jeremy.”
A few months later, O’Day was introduced to the glamorous life of a CFLer when the Argos held their training camp in Mississauga, Ont.
“It was almost like a mobile home that their locker-room was in,” O’Day says. “I remember walking around and I got all the way around the locker-room and I didn’t see my locker. Then I looked in the middle of the room and they had eight or 12 chairs, each with a piece of tape and the player’s name on it, and a little laundry bag underneath it to turn in. So there was my name.
“As training camp went on, there were less and less chairs around me. Eventually, it got to a point where finally you had a locker, and all the chairs had disappeared.”
The end of O’Day’s first season of pro football was much more exciting than the beginning. The Argonauts defeated Saskatchewan 47-23 at Commonwealth Stadium to win the Grey Cup.
O’Day spent one more season with the Argonauts, starting on an occasional basis, before becoming a free agent. His primary objective was to find a team on which he could receive more playing time.
“He thought he had an opportunity here,” Hall of Fame offensive lineman Gene Makowsky says, “and I guess the rest is history.”
Makowsky and O’Day were among the few keepers on the 1999 Roughriders, who lost their final nine regular-season games to finish with a 3-15 record.
Enter a new regime, led by general manager Roy Shivers and head coach Danny Barrett. The team gradually improved, registering victory totals of five, six, eight and 11 during a period in which O’Day became entrenched as the Riders’ starting centre.
The Roughriders plateaued at nine victories in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Midway through the latter season, Shivers was fired and Tillman was hired. Tillman’s first major move was to name Kent Austin the head coach shortly after the 2006 campaign.
Saskatchewan’s only full season under Austin and Tillman was an unqualified success. The 2007 Roughriders won the Grey Cup — which Makowsky and O’Day were among the first to receive — and triggered an age of financial prosperity that continues to this day.
O’Day continued to prosper, being selected a CFL all-star three times — in 2006, 2007 and 2009 — after turning 30.
He was also the 2008 recipient of the Tom Pate Memorial Award, which is presented annually to the CFL player who best demonstrates outstanding sportsmanship while also making a contribution to his team and his community.
O’Day’s contributions were also recognized internally. For many years, he was a team captain and a CFL Players’ Association player representative.
“He earned the respect of the other players,” former Riders president-CEO Jim Hopson says.
“There was one time when the players were coming off the field and bickering, because they lost a game they should have won. Everybody was grumbling in the dressing room. At some point, Jeremy stood up and said, ‘OK, enough!’ And that was it. How many guys can do that in a room of 40-plus individuals?”
O’Day stood out as a player, and as a leader, through the 2010 season — the sixth year in which he was named a West Division all-star. To cap each of his final two seasons as a player, the Roughriders suffered a heartbreaking Grey Cup loss to the Montreal Alouettes.
At 36, O’Day could have continued to play at a high level, but he aspired to remain in the sport at an administrative level and therefore seized the opportunity to become the Roughriders’ football operations co-ordinator in 2011.
Beginning in 2012, he spent three-and-a-half seasons as the team’s assistant GM before becoming the interim GM midway through the 2015 season, succeeding the deposed Brendan Taman.
O’Day was among the applicants for the vacant GM post after the 2015 season, but the Roughriders opted to hire Chris Jones shortly after he coached Edmonton to the Grey Cup championship.
Jones was named head coach, general manager and vice-president of football operations. O’Day remained on board as the assistant vice-president of football operations and administration, a position he held for three seasons.
He expected that number to reach four, at least, but …
O’Day was scouting for the Roughriders at the inaugural Mexico City player combine in January when he received a call from Jones, who passed along the information that he was about to interview for a position with the Cleveland Browns.
Jones instantly impressed the NFL team’s brass and was soon given the title of senior defensive assistant. Suddenly, in mid-January, the Roughriders were looking for a new GM and vice-president of football operations.
They didn’t have to look very far. O’Day, who had been groomed for the position, was quickly and unsurprisingly signed to a three-year contract by president and CEO Craig Reynolds.
All those years of studying rosters — dating back to Little League days in Lockport — had paid off.
“When I got done playing here, it was a no-brainer for me to stay involved in sports,” O’Day says. “It’s something I always wanted to do my whole life, anyway, so it doesn’t really feel like I get up and go to work every day. It’s something that I love doing.”
Even with the accompanying pressures.
“I know how much it means to everyone around here,” O’Day says. “It means just as much, or more, to me. Hopefully everyone understands that this is all I know. This is what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. This is where I’ve walked in the building every single day and tried to do the best I can and tried to make good decisions.
“Ultimately, the goal is to win more Grey Cups.”
O’Day already has two Grey Cup rings as a Roughrider, thanks to the championships of 2007 and 2013. He also understands the other end of the spectrum, having experienced a pair of 3-15 seasons and the most devastating defeat in franchise history — the 13th-man meltdown in the 2009 Grey Cup.
Through good times and bad, O’Day has been a constant with the Roughriders, having recently celebrated 20 years of continuous service.
“Maybe it means a little bit more to me because I know what it means to everyone else,” he says. “Everyone who comes through here, the first thing they talk about is our fans. Believe me, I live it and breathe it all day long, and I get asked questions everywhere I go. That’s what I understand about it.
“I would rather have it be in a place where it matters. Here is where it matters. You go to cities where no one even knows who you are. I’m not a real social guy, but I also understand that’s what makes the place great. I try to be open with people. I know that people want to know what’s going on, but they’re generally excited about the team.
“I know the responsibility of it. I’m excited about it. I wish the season would start right now.”
It’s something I always wanted to do ... it doesn’t really feel like I get up and go to work every day. It’s something that I love doing.