Knox more than ready to hit the field
He was hired by Ottawa last January, but season was lost to COVID -19
Greg Knox will never be as prepared for a new job as he’ll be when he’s able to step on an Ottawa Redblacks practice field.
It’s been almost a year since the Peterborough native was hired by the Redblacks as a defensive backs coach. He recently signed a new one-year contract after completing his first contract without coaching a game.
The 51-year-old decided to return to the Canadian Football League after serving as defensive co-ordinator for the University of Alberta Golden Bears and prior to that head coach of the McMaster Marauders. A two-time Grey Cup winner as a player with the Calgary Stampeders, Knox served one year as an assistant coach with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in 2015.
He gets calls every year from CFL teams inquiring about his services but the opportunities didn’t fit with his family or life circumstances.
When Ottawa head coach Paul LaPolice reached out after the 2019 season, Knox said all the pieces fit.
“I had a number of opportunities including going back to Edmonton, which I loved. (Golden Bears head coach) Chris Morris does a fantastic job there and the kids were great. Everything about it was very positive,” Knox said.
“It was a very difficult decision for me to step away from that but I’m also at a stage, now that the kids are out of high school, where I’m treating football more as a career. So I have to look at it through that lens.”
If he’s ever going to work his way up to the upper levels of CFL coaching, he could only say no to CFL opportunities for so long. Ottawa made sense for several reasons.
“If I want to take on senior
positions in the pros, I’m going to have to put my time in the league. If I’m going to do that, I want to do it in the best possible situation and I really felt comfortable when LaPo called me,” Knox said.
“The opportunity to coach with Paul and Mike Benavides and the rest of the staff and organization, this was an opportunity I had to take. The driving factor was the opportunity to work with a fantastic peer group in a healthy environment surrounded by good people with great experience and successful careers,” he added.
“It’s close to home and could be home. The organization is a class act. It checks off those boxes. While I’m used to being a co-ordinator or a head coach, I can’t snap my fingers and make that happen. I’m paying my dues. … If a coaching career in
the CFL is what I want, this is a step I have to take.”
He was hired last January and began preparing for a 2020 season that got cancelled by the pandemic.
“We worked from a premise of a normal start date and then reassessed what it would look like as we were dealing with the pandemic and its implications,” he said. “Coach LaPolice, Benavides and our management did a great job of moving us through that process. It was very challenging. I don’t mean just the fact you don’t get to coach or play or do the thing you love. Like anybody else, the uncertainty was a challenge.”
Throughout the summer, the coaches kept busy adding layers of preparation.
“We worked diligently on all the things you would do in lieu of not going to training camp.
We made great strides. I think we have the greatest playbook in the history of football. It’s probably a thousand pages now,” he said, with a chuckle.
“We turned what would be the classic paper playbook into a pretty evolved video, audio suite of football information. I can say I learned an enormous amount working with my colleagues in doing what we collectively thought was the best possible job we could do to get our players and staff ready for if and when the season got started.”
It was tough when the season was cancelled.
“Looking back, it was a little bit of disbelief,” he said.
“It was hard to have the crystal ball on what was going to happen but you’re certainly disappointed. Then you have to internalize and try to get your own perspective on it.”
Knox said circumstances allowed him to work from home. He could do his football work while continuing an ongoing rebuild of his Stoney Lake cottage.
“I was able to be hands on as much as I could and balance that with my football work. I certainly can’t complain on any front, especially considering the challenges the players were facing and certainly other people who weren’t lucky enough to be able to get a paycheque,” he said.
Uncertainty remains about a 2021 season.
“I hope there’s planning afoot for the good, better, best of what it’s going to look like and how it fits together,” Knox said.
“It’s very complicated,” he added.