In the late 1980s, a Mill Valley, Calif., high school coach, Michael Evans, was a tourist in the Netherlands. In an Amsterdam sporting goods store, Evans asked the young clerk about his “Crusaders” T-shirt.
The clerk said he played “American football” for the Crusaders, a club team. As he and Evans talked, it came out that one of the Crusaders’ top players was another kid named Romeo, the son of immigrants from Surinam, a Dutch-speaking nation on the northern coast of South America.
Nearly 20 years later, former NFL defensive tackle Romeo Bandison walked off the University of Colorado practice field Sunday in Boulder and talked about the unusual paths he took to becoming the Buffaloes’ defensive line coach this year.
In Amsterdam, Evans took a look at Bandison and was intrigued. Soon, with the approval of his family, Romeo left Amsterdam, traveled to Mill Valley and lived with Evans’ mother as he attended Tamalpais High School.
“Leaving your family behind is never easy,” Bandison said. “But I loved football and I wanted to be here.”
Dutch was his first language, but he had taken English in his Amsterdam school. He handled the Tamalpais classwork and, once football started, was hearing from college recruiters. He was big, strong and raw.
“The technique we had been taught in Holland wasn’t very good,” Bandison said. “In fact, a lot of things I learned were wrong.”
He ended up at Oregon. Although in many ways he was learning the game on the fly, he had a standout four-season collegiate career as an end and a nose guard and went to the Cleveland Browns in the third round of the 1994 draft. He was in the NFL for three seasons with the Browns and Redskins, then was cut at Washington during the 1997 exhibition season. Both for fun and to stamp himself as a possible camp player for the next season, Bandison played the early-year 1998 season with the Amsterdam Admirals in the NFL’s Europe operation, making a nice, little story – especially because he could count as one of the required “national” players on the roster and speak Dutch to reporters and fans.
After the Carolina Panthers waived him during fall camp, he accepted the inevitable. He returned to Oregon – where he previously had earned an economics degree in 1994 – to take additional classes and serve as a graduate assistant coach for the Ducks under Mike Bellotti.
“I think I was in my third year in the NFL when I really started talking about ‘after football,”‘ Bandison said. “There was nothing else I wanted to do. I couldn’t see myself in an office from 8 to 5.”
Football coaches work longer than that, and a grad assistant is a virtual volunteer, with compensation tied to the cost of taking postgraduate classes. The landscape has changed some since the days when “grad” assistants left the football offices after dark and went to other jobs to survive financially. In Eugene, for example, Jake Plummer’s future Arizona State coach, Bruce Snyder, was a bartender while serving as a grad assistant after his days as a Ducks fullback. But it still is a holding-pattern way for a prospective coach to take postgraduate classes, plus decide if he wants to pursue coaching.
Bandison helped with the defensive line for two seasons, then hooked on as a full-time assistant at Boise State with Dan Hawkins, who had just been promoted to head coach. And when Hawkins came to CU, he brought Bandison with him. Bandison’s arrival in Boulder was delayed because his wife, Amy, gave birth to the couple’s first children – twins Dominic and Olivia – in January.
His life turned that day a high school football coach walked into an Amsterdam sporting goods store, and he remains grateful for all of it.
“I’ve been very lucky,” Bandison said. “At Oregon, Boise State and here, I’ve been around a lot of great coaches, learned a lot and won a lot of games. I think at Oregon and Boise, the worst season we had was 8-4.”
That would sound good to CU fans this season.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
