“It’s about the right situation for my wife and my four kids”
Denver Post preps editor Kyle Newman caught up with Mike Schmitt to talk about his resignation as the Eaglecrest football coach. The move was announced Tuesday, with Schmitt and his family set to move to Nelson, Pa., after the fall semester.
Q: Do you have a new coaching job set up already?
A: Nothing set in stone. We had the opportunity to go to my wife’s family home and live there, and I’ll be looking for a job in the region when I get out there. I’m not sure exactly to what extent — if I find the right head job, the school that’s named after the town kind of place, then that’d be ideal. There are a few people I know, so when we get there I’ll be going around substitute teaching and looking for opportunities.
New York state is only 15 miles away, so there’s a few school districts set up there and around Pennsylvania, and that’s where we’re going to be looking in order to stay close to home. I’ve always enjoyed teaching math, so if I find the right job, I’ll do that, or if I need to be in the weight room again and teaching PE, that’s fine too — I’m kind of open to everything at this point, because for me right now, it’s about the right situation for my wife and my four kids more so than about a job.
Q: After coaching at Overland as an assistant in the early 2000s, where you were a part of the 2003 staff that went to the state title game, you lived and coached for quite some time in your native state of Louisiana. What’s the story of how you got back to Colorado?
A: We moved back to Colorado two years after Hurricane Katrina. I was the head coach at a small school in Buras, La., and Katrina hit and wiped my (home) out and the school out. I found a job around Baton Rouge, and we stayed there for a couple years. We weren’t completely happy there, just simply because we had gotten pushed there by the hurricane. So we came back to Colorado to work with Tony Manfredi again at Overland in 2008, and then I got the Eaglecrest job in 2010, where I’ve been fortunate to have the talented coaches and players you need to build the program into the season we had this year.
Q: What did you say to your players after the loss to Pomona in the championship game, and then also when you told them you were moving?
A: After the game, I told them it was all about the process of getting there — I know everybody wants to have a ring on their finger but you don’t necessarily need to have that ring to consider yourself a champion. Our kids played their hearts out Saturday, because we were banged up and fought through it, and we had a couple guys who really played outside themselves. There was nothing to hang their heads about, and I wanted to make sure they walked out of that stadium with pride, because a few snaps here and there and it’s a different ballgame. The kids knew they played hard, and that they played a great team with some unbelievably talented kids just like us.
As far as me leaving, I’ve never hidden to my team that my family’s the most important thing to me. They’re around my children and my wife all the time, so they understood the importance of me being around family. When I told the team about it, and how hard it’s been to be away from our family — my dad didn’t make a game this year, which was the first time since I don’t know when that my dad didn’t watch me coach or play in a football game — that was hard me for and it made me realize how far away we are from family.