PUEBLO — Here’s one indication that the startup Colorado State University-Pueblo football program, in only its fourth season in 2011, has made astounding progress.
A week ago, ThunderWolves coach John Wristen was less than thrilled with his team’s performance as he assessed his players outside the locker room at the Neta and Eddie DeRose ThunderBowl.
“We have to play a little better than this to get where we want to be,” he said.
His cause for concern?
The ThunderWolves had just squeezed out a 47-0 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference victory over Fort Lewis. Like Jon Embree at Colorado, Steve Fairchild at Colorado State and Troy Calhoun at Air Force, Wristen — a 17-year Division I assistant at CU, UCLA and Northwestern — is now coaching at his alma mater.
Wristen’s situation is a little different: He is both helping carry on a tradition, since he was a standout quarterback for the school in the early 1980s when it was called the University of Southern Colorado, and is instrumental in establishing one, since the school dropped football after the 1984 season and the program wasn’t revived until the 2008 season.
“I really think what’s neat is that whoever graduated from here when it was USC or CSU-Pueblo, or even when this was a junior college, on Sunday morning, now they’re looking in the paper to see what the football score is,” Wristen said. “That’s part of being a program.”
So far, CSU-Pueblo has balanced ambition with realism.
With the startup “Friends of Football” fundraising drive spearheaded by former USC player Dan DeRose, the school ended up with the use of a gem of a little stadium — the ThunderBowl, named after DeRose’s parents — with a locker room-weight room-office facility behind the south end zone. The fundraising group came up with $11.6 million for the startup and construction costs, and technically owns and leases the stadium — adjacent to, but not officially on, the campus — back to the school for $100 a year.
The RMAC has a self-imposed scholarship limit of 28, or eight below the Division II maximum. Nobody — at least not yet — seems to be advocating that CSU-Pueblo move up from Division II, a course the University of Northern Colorado took, with so-far dismal results in football, after winning two Division II national championships.
After going 4-6, 7-4 and 9-2 in their first three seasons, the ThunderWolves improved to 5-0 on Saturday after spoiling Chadron State’s homecoming with a 38-28 victory. They return home for a nationally televised (on CBS College Sports) meeting with fellow RMAC power Colorado Mines on Thursday night.
Building from the ground up
There are so many intriguing story lines with this little program, a few can get lost. One is Wristen — a Pueblo South High graduate who attended a Broncos camp and was cut after his standout USC career — coming home. Another is a largely veteran staff that includes a former Broncos star, Steve Sewell, as running backs coach, and former CU quarterback Bernard Jackson as the receivers coach. Also, many of this season’s seniors showed up at CSU-Pueblo in 2008 to join a program that for a time practiced at the Pueblo Schools’ Dutch Clark Stadium, while having to take it on faith that the hole in the ground by the campus was going to turn into a stadium. The big name on that list is diminutive former Loveland High standout Jesse Lewis, who holds the school’s record for all-purpose yards (3,842) and has 3,071 rushing yards in his four-season career.
“When I came down here on my recruiting trip, it was all dirt, two-by- fours and blueprints,” Lewis said. “Being able to look out there now and know that the last four years, we’ve been building something, I take a lot of pride in that. We were the guinea pigs. What we did, right or wrong, the program was going to be built off that. I think we’ve done it right.”
Said Wristen: “I’ve told those guys that after four years, there’s going to be a sign in the locker room and I’m going to put all their names up there. The pride and tradition of Pack football is not going to be entrusted to the weak. This group will set the standard.”
Sewell, who played his college ball at Oklahoma, laughed when he looked back.
“That first year, Coach Wristen would say, ‘I wish someone could write a book about this,’ ” Sewell said. “Some people would just walk in off the street, saying, ‘I’d love to be a coach here,’ or, ‘I’d love do be a player here . . . what can I do?’ There were a lot of comical things, like us having our office in the library, guys getting out of their cars in their uniforms for practice.
“I think those memories, and those bonds, are going to last awhile.”
Daring to dream
One of the most daring parts of the revival was that the ThunderWolves jumped right in, playing a full RMAC varsity schedule in Year 1. Senior tight end Koby Wittek, from Golden, said: “I had a coach in high school who told me that in the first year of the program down here, we should split up into the Thunder and the Wolves and play each other for 11 weeks before we entered the RMAC. I had a little higher expectations than that, but not nearly as high as what we’ve accomplished.”
What next?
“We would like to see if we can figure out a way to become established as a top RMAC team, and then we’d love to down the road a bit be in a position for a national championship at this level,” athletic director Joe Folda said.
Folda concedes that winning that national title would be a monumental accomplishment coming out of a 28-scholarship league. He said he has at least brought up the possibility at league meetings of the RMAC lifting the limit to the Division II maximum. The ThunderWolves haven’t yet even hit the 28-scholarship level, but the flexibility to eventually get to 36 would be a crucial step.
“I want to win not only an RMAC championship, I want to win a national championship,” Wristen said. “Obviously, we’d love to have more scholarship money, and we’d love to have a lot of stuff, but I’m not smart enough to think that we can’t do it.”
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
