PUEBLO, Colo.—Colorado State University-Pueblo has hired former UCLA assistant and CSU-Pueblo alumnus John Wristen as the school’s first football coach in 22 years.
The university, known as the University of Southern Colorado when Wristen was a quarterback there, lost its football program in 1985 in a campuswide reorganization. But the Thunderwolves were scheduled to begin playing in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference in the fall of 2008.
Wristen’s career in Division I football started in 1990 as a graduate assistant at Colorado, which won a national championship that year.
He was an assistant coach at Northwestern from 1991 to 1999, then returned to Colorado as an assistant coach between 1999 and 2006. He added the title of recruiting coordinator at Colorado in 2003. Last season, he was special teams and tight ends coach at UCLA. He resigned in June to pursue the job at CSU-Pueblo.
