Stanford I ~ Cornell ~ Stanford II ~ Home
Stanford I ~ Cornell ~ Stanford II ~ Home |
1965: Westminster College head coach |
In 1965, at tiny Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Seifert's coaching strengths were already on display. "He was intense, really intense. He knew football and really got into it,'' former team captain Richard Balderson said in a 1995 article by Westminster writer Christopher Thomas. The article said that Seifert's greatest attribute was knowing how to handle people and that his players enjoyed playing for him. Before the offer came to start up Westminster's dormant football program, Seifert had accepted a job as a junior high teacher in Sacramento and was finishing up his master's degree at Utah. Linda Seifert -- his fiancee at the time -- has said, "I thought I was marrying a school teacher." Instead, for $3,500 and a campus apartment, Seifert built a football team from scratch. "They had no team, no schedule, no nothing," Seifert said of the Westminster Parsons program, which had discontinued football in 1961. "I was 24 years old, had some players that were older than me, and I did some things that I wouldn't have dreamed of doing in the later stages of my coaching career." With a squad reduced to about 20 players because of injuries, Seifert's head coaching debut was a 26-12 loss to Carroll College. The Parsons wound up with a 3-3 season, including a forfeit: Carroll College 26 - Westminster 12 |
the Westminster College Parsons football team from scratch, doing it all from recruiting players, devising strategy (above, center) to taping ankles (below). |
Stanford I ~ Cornell ~ Stanford II ~ Home |
George Seifert has described his first head coaching job as "the
most fun I ever had coaching, except maybe (1994)," when he led his
49ers to the Super Bowl.