Where else but in a high school football coach’s office would you expect to find Joe Glenn this time of the year.
If you haven’t heard, Glenn is back in coaching and out on the recruiting trail. With his batteries recharged, Glenn has taken on the job of rebuilding the program at the University of South Dakota, his alma mater.
He hasn’t had quite enough time to put his personal stamp on the position, but Mitt Romney could bet $10,000 that he soon will. It’ll be something different from when he was at Wyoming and taking any opportunity when a piano was around to provide his version of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”
South Dakota’s sports teams are the Coyotes, and there may not be a ready-made theme song.
“I said no three times,” Glenn said of the process that led him back to coaching. “Things happen sometimes when you least expect it. They said I had what they were looking for in a coach. I asked my wife (Michele) if she wanted to go back to Vermillion. We had loved it there before, so it became an easy choice.”
When the call came from South Dakota, Glenn was living almost in self-exile in Arizona. He had been fired at Wyoming, and the setback had been enough to diminish even his patented upbeat personality.
“I was beat up,” Glenn said of the time when he thought he was through with coaching. “I questioned if I would coach again. For one thing, my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook from people looking for a coach.”
When Glenn took the Wyoming job in 2003, he seemed a perfect fit. His friendly, down-home style would help bring back disgruntled Cowboys fans to War Memorial Stadium, and his history of success would help rescue a program that had gone into the dumps.
Glenn was well-known in the area and well acquainted in traditional recruiting lines, including Colorado. He had guided the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley to NCAA Division II national championships in 1996 and 1997.
“We stayed at Wyoming for six years,” Glenn said. “You remember everything. We beat UCLA in the Las Vegas Bowl. We beat Tennessee at Tennessee. Our downfall was not getting a quality quarterback, and you can’t miss at quarterback.”
Glenn’s departure came amid some turmoil in the Wyoming athletic department.
“I didn’t have an advocate in the athletic department,” Glenn said. “I inherited a team that had won only a few games in three years. Some of my last recruits are on this year’s team that’s going to a bowl game. But the bottom line is there’s that thing at the end of the field called a scoreboard. We didn’t win enough games.”
Glenn’s regret from his days at Wyoming was passing on quarterback Noah Shepard from Legacy High School. When he wasn’t offered a scholarship at Wyoming, Shepard went to South Dakota and rewrote the school record book, including career total offensive yardage with 11,133 and career touchdowns with 77.
Glenn is going back to his roots at South Dakota, now an FCS program in the Great West Conference. He was there as a player, and he started his coaching career as an assistant coach on the Coyotes’ staff in 1974. His coaching steps took him to Doane (Neb.) in 1976, Montana in 1980, UNC in 1987, back to Montana as head coach in 2000 and Wyoming three years later.
Is he starting back up the coaching ladder from where he first began?
“I like to have fun with it,” Glenn said. “I’m recruiting, and life is good. I’m working 14 hours a day, and the batteries are recharged. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, but this time I’ll try to get the scoreboard right. But this is it. Mark my words, this is my last stop.”
Irv Moss: 303-954-1296 or imoss@denverpost.com
Glenn bio
Born: March 7, 1949, in Lincoln, Neb.
High school: Pius X, Lincoln
College: South Dakota
Family: Wife Michele, daughter Erin, son Casey
Hobby: golf
In the future: Trips to Ireland and Germany for a glimpse of ancestry
