With football in a nebulous position and the recruiting process in a relative holding pattern, we at Golden Bear Report are looking to do interviews wherever we can. This week, we got Cal co-defensive coordinator/associate head coach Tim DeRuyter on to talk about going into football, military service, getting back into football and more.
This is part one of an interview that has been transcribed and lightly edited for clarity.
Previous Installments: Justin Wilcox, Part One | Justin Wilcox, Part Two | Charlie Ragle, Part One | Charlie Ragle, Part Two | Peter Sirmon, Part One | Peter Sirmon, Part Two | Aristotle Thompson, Part One | Aristotle Thompson, Part Two | Angus McClure, Part One | Angus McClure, Part Two
TT: What sports did you play growing up?
TD: I was a traditional kid growing up, I played football, basketball, and baseball all year round.
TT: Have you found that some of your earliest influences as a coach came from playing multiple sports?
TD: I think so, I grew up and went to Catholic school, and we had a coach there named Bob Fitzpatrick at St. Joseph’s Elementary School, I think there were maybe 200 CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) schools in LA county. He was our athletic director and ran the football program. It was flag football and St. Joseph’s was always in the top four or five, one year we won the whole thing. We had some pretty good athletes, but we also knew that Bob was a great coach and did a great job at getting us ready to compete.
TT: In addition, you went to St. John Bosco before it became what it is today, how much has that program changed since you were there?
TD: I think the private schools in general have changed a lot and the private schools have done a lot, Bosco’s one of the ones to lead that way. You look at the resources they have, the coaching staff and the continuity, it has been different.
When I was at Bosco, we had a couple different coaches, but we had a guy named Terry Roach, who was again another big influence on me deciding to be a coach. He came in my junior year, we were at the bottom of the league and the year before we weren’t much better than that. He was committed the next year that we were going to go from worst to first, had t-shirts printed up, and sure enough, next year we won the Del Ray league at that time (Bosco is now in the Trinity League) and we went to the quarterfinals or semifinals of the CIF playoffs. Guys like him could truly inspire, and back then, public schools were probably on as even of footing as any of the private schools, but I think with the funding of the public schools not having budgets to hire football coaching staff unless they’re teachers, I think it’s difficult for the public schools to compete with the elite private schools. Then the elite private schools have gotten great coaches.
TT: You have a unique experience among the Cal staff in that you have military service, why go into the Air Force?
TD: Well, I didn’t grow up thinking I was going to go into the Air Force. When I was a junior, I started getting recruited by different schools and Air Force was one of them. An assistant at the time (at Air Force) was Fisher DeBerry, and he was unique. At the time I met him, he stood out among the other recruiters, for one he was from the deep South, South Carolina, but he had a really infectious energy about him, just constantly on. As I went through the recruiting process, I ended up taking official visits to Princeton, Harvard, and the Air Force Academy. I wanted to go to an elite academic school, I was hoping Stanford or Cal would’ve recruited me, I got letters, but that was it, and I also wanted to play division one football at the highest level.
Coach DeBerry sat me down at the time and said, ‘Tim, do you want to play against Dartmouth and Penn or do you want to play against Notre Dame and BYU?’ I said, ‘I want to play against the big boys,’ and he said ‘come to the Air Force Academy.’ That was the reason I initially wanted to go, to play big-time football and get an elite education.
When you get there, you obviously realize more of the service component of it, I was blessed that I got a chance to do that. My service was unique, I was in seven and a half years. My first year, I wanted to fly, but didn’t get the opportunity because I had too many physicals that I had to get, I had bad eyes at the time, I’d had a couple knee surgeries, concussions, so they decided not to put me in a multi-million dollar aircraft. I was a management major at the academy, it’s like business, and I chose a career field, procurement, that fit with that. I went into Systems Acquisition, but before I did that, they allowed a certain amount of guys to be grad assistants for the football team for one year. I always wanted to be a coach, so I talked to coach DeBerry about it and he allowed me to be a grad assistant in 1985. We were actually pretty good that year, went 12-1, beat Notre Dame for the 4th year in a row, beat Texas in the Bluebonnet Bowl and we ended up 5th in the country. Being with a bunch of guys like me that weren’t highly recruited, but saw what coaching and putting together a plan, playing football and playing for each other, not playing with elite athletes but still winning football games, it’s what really intrigued me about coaching.
I was able to do that my first year, then I went to contracting school and was stationed just outside of Boston at Hanscom Air Force Base. I was there for three years and I was an elite contract negotiator for research and development contracts and electronic systems. I worked on a program, one of the major ones was the Ground Wave Emergency Network. It was an early relay node network that in case a nuclear event ever happened and an electromagnetic pulse wiped out all communication, this system would launch and reconnect all of our communication for the commander-in-chief and all the military.
It was an interesting program, I did that for three years, and the last six months of it, I was chosen by the commander to be the executive officer for the contracting division. I thought I was going to do that for one more year, and finish my total of five years of active duty service commitment and maybe go on to work for the government on the other side, because that was pretty lucrative and there’s a lot of former military working for the Raytheons, other defense contractors like that, tripling up your salary, which isn’t too bad.
A year before that happened I got a call from coach DeBerry, and he asked me if I wanted to be one of the assistant coaches. They have four military assistant coaching positions, they had nine normal assistants plus four military coaches and at the time, I thought I was going to be able to be out of the Air Force in five years, but I got an opportunity to coach for four more years and serve the country, there’s probably no better way to do that, so I went back to the Academy and coached for four more years. Again, we went to four straight bowl games, and we ended up beating Ohio State in the Liberty Bowl, Mississippi State when they had Jackie Sherill (as their head coach) in the Liberty Bowl and had a fantastic experience.
Unfortunately, it was only a four year assignment, so I had to make a decision at that time, to either take another assignment or to get out. I put in my paperwork to get out and hoped to get another coaching job, but nobody left the staff (at Air Force). It was time to make a choice of being a GA or a volunteer and my wife Kara and I, we just had our son Jake, and said ‘time to grow up, can’t be a GA now and not make any money.’ So I ended up getting out and going into private business for two years.
TT: What did private business entail for you?
TD: I worked for a company, called Walter Lorenz Surgical, I was a sales consultant for them, going into operating rooms and talking to doctors about using our plating systems. I worked in an area where we had micro-titanium plating systems and worked primarily with oral and maxillofacial surgeons, plastic surgeons, and EMTs, where if a guy got into an accident, skull was crushed and got a plate in your skull, I was the guy there who was providing the plates and screws.
It was interesting work, you’d be in there during surgery, assisting the staff with certain things. It was real unique, I enjoyed the work but it wasn’t a team-like thing, you were always the sales guy. I always missed (the team aspect), and I always used to call a doctor who was the head of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the University of Pittsburgh hospitals, to this day he’s still a really good friend of mine, and he’s still one of the top oral and maxillofacial surgeons in the country. He had a joy about him, had a pep in his step the entire time and he loved what he did. He had his group of doctors that were with him, his interns, he treated them like he was the coach and they were his team, he was going to get them ready to go do what he was doing. When I was in surgery with him, he said ‘Tim, I’m gonna treat you like one of my guys, you better know anatomy, and if I ask you a question, you better know.’
That was one of the most fun parts of doing that, but the other part was typical sales stuff, knocking on a door, being told no, and having to knock on another one.
TT: Would you say it’s easier to recruit players or to sell plating systems in your opinion?
TD: Honestly, I don’t know, in both of them it’s about relationships and understanding the customer, which in our case in coaching is the player. It’s not a case of trying to convince someone of something, but it’s trying to find out what makes them tick and how your product, your school, fits that need, making them understand how you can be the solution for their problems.
TT: Continuing on, how’d you get back into coaching at Ohio University under Jim Grobe?
TD: Jim Grobe was my position coach my senior year at the Academy, and when I was a grad assistant I worked with him and the outside linebackers that year. When I came back to the Academy in 89 as a military coach, I worked with coach Grobe for four years, so I’d been around him quite a bit, I knew he was unique, a special guy and a great coach, so I’d kept in touch with him.
When I left the Air Force, I told him as well as a few other coaches on staff that if he ever got the chance to hire me, I wanted to be a coach. You don’t expect to get a call, but two years later I was leaving a case, driving back from Erie, Pennsylvania. I get a call, I had a bag phone, it was a big old brick of a phone that you could carry anywhere around, but it would also plug into your car. He calls me out of the blue from Hawaii, Air Force was done playing for the year in November and they had just gotten done playing in Hawaii. He says, ‘hey, you said when you left, you wanted to be a coach. Do you really want to be a coach?’
I was like, ‘well, what are you talking about?’
He says ‘I’m a finalist for the job at Ohio University, if I get it do you want to be my defensive coordinator.’
So I’m driving down the road, thinking in my head really quickly ‘if I tell him yes, he’s probably not going to get this job, he’s the linebackers coach at Air Force. If I tell him no, he’ll never call me again and ask me, so what’s it gonna hurt me to tell him yes?’
So I say ‘heck yeah Grobe, if you get it, I’m in!’ And this is back in the day before the internet, so there was no way of knowing what was happening in the search. I just assumed he didn’t get it because I didn’t hear from him for a couple weeks, but a couple weeks later he calls me and says ‘I got the job, when are you gonna come down?’
And I’m like ‘oh crap.’
Mind you, we had just built a house in Pittsburgh, I was doing really well with the company, we had just had our second child, Christina (currently director of on-campus recruiting at Texas Tech), and my wife had just landscaped the house, put curtains up, and I’m like ‘oh God, I’m gonna have to leave this.’ I’m sure Grobe sensed some hesitation in my voice, so he said, ‘I won’t hold you to it, just take care of the kids, drive down to Athens, and we’ll talk about it.’
We did, and I had a figure in my head, that if he paid me this, I could probably make it work. He of course offered me just below that (laughs), but it worked out and we left the plates and screws world of Walter Lorenz Biomed and went back into coaching, and I’ve been coaching ever since.
TT: You obviously played linebacker at Air Force, and you’ve coached defense throughout your career, what about defense called to you and why the 3-4 defense in particular?
TD: Why defense, it’s been in my blood. I kid sometimes when I’m recruiting guys who play both ways, that if you’re a guy growing up, you built Legos and designed things, you’re an offensive guy. If you’re the guy who came in here and broke everything, you’re a defensive guy. That was me growing up, I was somebody who had fun being an antagonist, being a contrarian.
And why the 3-4? I think it gives you the best opportunity to be multiple of any defense. You can force an offense to account for seven guys immediately in protection. As I talk to offensive guys, that’s one thing they don’t like, they’d much prefer to say ‘here are the four guys rushing the passer, this is how we’re going to set our protection, and now I can worry about the quarterback because he’s gonna be protected, how do I get him to distribute the ball, read the coverage and put it out on time.’ In a 3-4 you can bring any combination of guys and they’ve got to keep people in to protect, or they’re going to have issues.
