Glasrud moving on from Shadows to join Mountaineers
With nothing left to prove in his hometown, Garret Glasrud is leaving his position of head coach with the Shaunavon Shadows football team to join an NCAA Division II football program.
Glasrud, 31, will join the Western State Colorado University Mountaineers as their linebackers coach for the upcoming season.
“It just was really random here. It just kind of fell into place within the last week,” explained Glasrud. “I have been at Shaunavon for a few years now and I kind of hit a point where I was either gonna stay and be the head coach of the next 50 years or survive as long as I could, but when this opportunity come up I kind of knew that it might not ever happen again. So it was something to try and chase down. It was just going to be an opportunity that I would regret if I didn’t go try it.”
Glasrud played for the Shadows in high school and then suited up for Montana State Northern when he played on the defensive line for the Lights at the NAIA level.
Glasrud began coaching the Shadows defense in 2009 and then took over as head coach in 2012. He led the Shadows to two SHSAA 2A Nine-man Provincial Championships over the past three seasons.
His final act with his hometown team was to defeat the visiting Indian Head Broncs 24-7 in the provincial championship game on November 11, 2017. He also led the Shadows to a title in 2015 to end a championship drought that had stretched back to 1982.
“I don’t know what else we could do in Shaunavon to make it more exciting than it already is,” admitted Glasrud. “We brought in the night games in 2014 and we’ve had those growing and now the communities around us are starting to do them, so we grew football in the Southwest that way. We’ve had the two provincial championships the past few years. We’ve had a winning record of I think 35-14 or something like that the last six years. For myself there’s not much more we can do, so I felt it was a good time to let somebody else take it over and maybe somebody else will have new ideas and new ways to grow the sport in town.”
The Shadows will move on with Jordi Thomas at head coach and Mike Lewans as assistant. Thomas is also an ex Shadow who played under Glasrud and has been on the coaching staff for the past four seasons.
“They’re guys that understand football and they’ve been around the system long enough. I think it’s a good opportunity for them to get their feet wet as well,” said Glasrud.
The Mountaineers compete in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference and are coming off a 1-9 season.
“I’m really excited to be honest because when you go to do something like that your commitment for time is basically solely to football. You wake up in the morning and you do film sessions and meetings. You have meetings throughout the day, you have practice, and more meetings and film sessions in the evening. You don’t have to fit a work schedule in there that consists of doing other stuff. You don’t have to schedule life, you can just kind of go and do football,” said Glasrud.
The Mountaineers will open the season on the road on August 31 against the host Idaho State University Bengals.
“It will be steep,” he said of the learning curve. “It will be a good learning curve, but I think with the coaches that are down there that I can work with I should be able to get onto it pretty fast and hopefully make my own way there and hold my own and help the team out.”