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 running backs coach Aristotle Thompson on the phone to talking about grinding his way up the coaching ladder from the high school ranks eventually to Cal

This is part two 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

TT: When did you know that playing professionally may not be an option and coaching was your profession of choice?

AT: End of my junior year. In the middle of our season I got hurt, I separated my AC (joint) and pulled my hamstring, so I didn’t get back healthy until the last game of the season, then we had bowl practices, I was on the edge thinking I was going to get my turn, a couple guys got hurt, and it didn’t happen.

I was like ‘okay, I’m gonna work my butt off this next year to play, but I kind of knew that I had to do well in other things, football was not the only thing, and I had a good educational background, so getting a degree was always in the cards. I originally wanted to go to law school, but then I thought I didn’t want to go to school for another two or three years right now. I knew that after working with our coaching staff, going in there, seeing guys like Marvin Lewis come through there during the offseason, spending time with coach Koetter and those guys, it was like ‘I can do this.’ Midway through my senior year, I had made up my mind that I was going to be a coach.

TT: What was your initial move after finishing out your eligibility?

AT: I was trying to look for opportunities to stay on at Boise State, and I ended up getting an intern job in strength and conditioning, working with the strength coach, coach (Jeff) Pitman, who was also a Boise State alum, I was able to cut my teeth a bit around something I was passionate about, to keep me close to the game.

I knew I wanted to coach, and after doing that, I was like ‘I’m gonna get a GA spot (at Boise).’ A GA spot didn’t happen, I almost went into juvenile probation and corrections, I had a relative who had been in California Youth Authority for 15 years, said ‘hey I’ve got an opportunity for you to move down to southern California and do this.’ I was like ‘ehhhhhh,’ it sounded good because it was a job, it was money, I had a degree, but I wasn’t passionate about doing it every day. I’m still passionate about helping youth and being involved in the community, but I didn’t want to do it on that side.

I was in Boise, hoping that somebody was going to call me for a GA spot, I’m not working the phones, writing letters, not doing the necessary stuff here, (but thinking) someone’s going to find me. I end up getting a phone call from a good friend of mine who was still playing at Boise, Ryan Dinwiddie, who’s now the head coach of the Toronto Argonauts, I got a call from his father, who said ‘hey AT, a friend of mine just took a job at a high school just outside of Boise, I’d love to connect you with him.’ I went to have lunch with a guy by the name of Jay Winnery, who was from Central California and got hired at Nampa HS (outside of Boise) and was trying to put his staff together. If you have a high school in the area of a university, you see which former players want to coach. So coach Winnery hired me to coach his wide receivers and defensive backs for about $2000. (The money), that ain’t going too far, but I was able to parlay that in the same year into a job at the high school substitute teaching and doing campus security. The principal there, Byron Holtrey, one of his sons I had played with at Boise State, he was all about using sports to bring the community and campus together. He wanted us to not only be there to provide as coaches, but to bring a younger perspective to some of these students on campus, and to build relationships (with being on campus). Being able to do that for a year, it was awesome for me. I’ll never forget my time with the Nampa Bulldogs.

TT: How’d you move back into the college game?

AT: I took a job at Eastern Oregon, and I did this because I thought ‘I’ll do this for one year, I’ll bounce back to Boise State, I’ll be a GA, I’ll move up, do all these cool things.’ Well, Boise State hired some other people, I think one of them was coach Wilcox at the time, and Bryan Harsin was hired there at the time. When Bryan went to Boise, he gave me a call and said ‘hey, I’ll give your number to someone, they’re looking for a coach, Eastern Oregon University, the place I was just at.’ I take a look at it, go down, and they want to interview me for a defensive backs job, so I go in there, go through all my DB progression, all the stuff you do as a young coach, you go through your coaching points. You’re not looking for too much, it’s are you organized, are you detailed. I go through that and at the end of the interview, the head coach, Jim Fenwick, says ‘you played offense at Boise State, right?’ I say I did, and he says ‘let’s sit down and talk about the offense at Boise State.’ We talked offense at Boise for another two, two and a half hours, and he says ‘I know you came in here to interview for the DB job, but I want you to coach my wide receivers.’ I say, ‘alright, if you’re paying I’ll do it.’ I wanted to be on offense, he offered me the job for a whopping $5,000 a year. I say ‘ooof, but you know what? If I want to coach college, this is a sacrifice I’m going to have to do. I took the leap, went to Eastern Oregon, was there for two years and learned a lot.

One of the biggest things I learned there, and this is something I tell everyone who wants to get into coaching, is that you can’t look at the head coaches and assistant coaches who are making all this money and say ‘that’s why I want to do it.’ If you want to coach college football, you have to be willing to sacrifice in a number of ways. You have to sacrifice your time, sacrifice quality time, at times, with your family, you’re going to have to be willing to sacrifice financially. If you’re going into it thinking you’re going to make so much money, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.

Those years in La Grande, some tough years, but I made some good relationships there, and my cousin got the job at Grant High School in Portland, back where I’m from. He calls me up and said ‘I need you on my staff,’ so I went. I was coaching linebackers and running backs there, second year I was the defensive coordinator and coaching running backs. That was a lot of fun. Those years at Nampa and Eastern Oregon were tough because we didn’t have a lot of talent, but the drive across the board, it was what I wanted. When I was at Eastern Oregon it was non-scholarship, so we were mass-recruiting year round, we were trying to get kids to come in there. There were some great players that we had, some players who were great kids that maybe weren’t the best football players. I ran across a lot of good people and made a lot of good relationships, still have a lot of good relationships. That time at Grant, it was special because I was going back to a high school that was two and a half miles from my house. My mom had gone to high school there, this was a place that was special to me and was special in what we built there. We took the city by storm a little bit, we were ranked number two in the state.

I feel like that shaped me and I was on the right path, that this is what I want to be doing, impacting lives in a positive way, impacting the community, growing as a man and doing it within the game of football. This wasn’t my only job at the time, I worked at a place called the Youth Employment Institute. I had a caseload of 40-50 students at the time, students that were working on their GED, work placement, a lot of kids that wouldn’t make it in the normal classroom setting that I was going over, coaching. It was gratifying and a good challenge for me because I wasn’t about kids just getting jobs. I wanted to help them get jobs and put some money in their pockets, but I wanted these kids to go to college. I pushed any kid that came across my caseload so that not only are they getting their GED in order for me to keep signing off on the incentives they were getting, they had to take a college placement test, they had to apply to a college. Probably on average, a third of my cases would transition to taking classes at least at a community college. It wasn’t about graduating high school, that’s what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to go to college, that was the attitude instilled in me and my family.

It was really awesome to build those relationships, talk to those kids, and see them grow. Moving into that 2007 season at Grant, I get a call, and I’m working with my cousin at Grant, but a good friend of mine Julius Brown gives me a call and says ‘hey, I’m transitioning to a graduate assistant spot (from a recruiting role), are you interested in coming over for the job here, I want to talk to coach Pete, would you take the job if he offered it?’ I said ‘in a heartbeat,’ because I knew I wanted to be in college, and Boise State was a place I thought of fondly. I talked to Chris Petersen a week or so later, he takes me through all these scenarios, asks me questions trying to figure out who I am, because I’d met coach Pete but I hadn’t spent time around him. Coach Pete offered me the job and I accepted it. About a week later, I was driving over to Boise and I feel that was my breakthrough moment, back at my alma mater in a college program, I’m in the mix.

It was really humbling, because I wanted to coach, and I had zero coaching responsibilities. Everything I did was around recruiting and operations. I helped the DFO in travel, I set the recruiting schedule, I organized coaches, where they were going out and when they were going out. I entered questionnaires manually, I broke down film of recruits, I did any and everything about the operations within football and running the recruiting department. It gave me a chance to become better in what I do in recruiting and understanding that you’ve got to have so many ways to build relationships with young men, their families, high school coaches. It also gave me a chance to see the way coach Pete operated and learn from him without the X and O part, to see the big picture through the lens he was looking at and to see the way things were done.

There were times where I’d do a project, I’d bring it in and (say) ‘hey coach Pete, what do you think?’ And he’d be like ‘yeeaahh’(think Lumbergh in Office Space), and once you’d hear that, you knew there was something he didn’t like and you had to pinpoint it and figure it out. You got to know his mannerisms and his tone. It was one of the bigger growth periods I had, with the time with coach Koetter and the time with coach Petersen, (it taught me) this is how you’ve got to operate, this is how you’ve got to do things. I was blessed to be around there and work with a great group of guys.

That’s one of the things that I love so much about being at Cal now, the guys I’m working around, the guys I’m working with, the guy I’m working for, they’re awesome people. When you’re around awesome people, it makes what you do on a daily basis that much better. (At Boise) Coach Wilcox was on the staff at that time. You had Pete Kwiatkowski, who’s the defensive coordinator at Washington now, you had Keith Bhonapha, who I worked directly with, as the director of operations there. You had Bryan Harsin, Marcel Yates, Chris Strausser (OL coach with the Indianapolis Colts), Scott Huff (OL coach at UW), Julius Brown, there were a lot of good guys that are still impacting college football now. Being able to work around those guys, to learn from them and to be able to build relationships with them, made that time special and I was able to grow that much more seeing the way they did things and the way they wanted things.

That was my jumpstart into college football truly on the coaching side, that you’re trying to bring kids in for scholarships, bring them in, bring their families in, get to grow with them, but keep who you are as a program and as a man, not sacrificing either just to get a kid. We went after kids that fit our program, kids that had the passion to play the way we aspired to see them play, and kids that wanted to compete on and off the field. I think when you have an idea of who and what you want to recruit and not just somebody that you see great film from, it makes it that much better and when you see things trend the way they do.

TT: From there, you got your first position coaching job in college, how did you end up at Cal Poly?

AT: Tim Walsh got the job at Cal Poly, I knew him from high school, he recruited me (out of high school) at Portland State. He had left Portland State and went to Army at the offensive coordinator, and at that time, my father-in-law was the head coach at Army. They’d been let go, and coach Walsh went down to Cal Poly and he knew what I was doing at Boise. He had known what I was doing and where I was going. I had interviewed with coach Walsh when he was at Portland State but didn’t get the job then. He gave me a call ‘I need a running backs coach, can you come down?’ I was a grad assistant at Boise, this was my first opportunity to coach a position, and I was going to be the recruiting coordinator, so I still had the responsibilities I had at Boise, so I said yeah, sight unseen. Didn’t know anything about Cal Poly, didn’t know where San Luis Obispo was, took the job and I was blessed to land in a good spot, a great community, a great area.

My first year here was a whirlwind, but it was reassuring. One of the players I coached at Grant, Andre Broadus, was down here at Cal Poly. We’d already had a bond and we were able to grow throughout his time here. Worked with a lot of great people at Cal Poly, it was a great time for me. I have four kids that were born here in San Luis Obispo, we have great ties to the community and they’re great people.

Throughout the 10 years here, we won a couple conference championships and graduated a ton of kids, and seeing guys move into careers outside of football is something I’m passionate about. When you graduate 18-19 guys, and before the season, some already have degrees or are one class away, and they already have jobs lined up for them when they’re done playing, that’s cool to see and that’s something I’ve come to learn about guys at Cal. They’re driven academically, they’re driven to be professionals in every area. Some of the work that’s being done on a daily basis at Cal is preparing them for life after football, and I think that’s pretty awesome.

TT: How did you end up meeting Justin Wilcox and do you have a good story about him that won’t have either of us getting a phone call when this is published?

AT: I think I actually met Justin during one of those games my junior or senior year (at U of O) when you’re doing the whole recruiting walkaround that you do around the facilities, listening to the coaches talk, so I think we met then. His brother was already a big name at the University of Oregon, he was the man down there. It was cool to meet him, but we didn’t have a lot of interaction then.

Then when I went to Boise (for college), probably my second year there, one of my good friends, Erik Nicolaisen, was living across the street or right next door to Justin. We had casually bumped into each other a couple times down there if I was there in the offseason. I can’t say that I have any great stories that won’t get a phone call, but this one resonates with me.

When coach Wilcox got hired at Cal, I’m at Cal Poly and Nicolaisen, we’d stayed in contact since high school, I’d actually stayed with him, he lives in the LA area, and I stayed with him from time to time when I was out there recruiting, his family would always come up to San Luis Obispo for a game and our families were pretty close. When Justin got the job, Erik would just be peppering him about me, calling, texting, not over the top so he would stop taking his calls, but to keep throwing my name out there.

Fast forward to this year when I got the job at Cal, Justin turns to me and says ‘so, what do you think?’

I’m like, ‘I’m good, I want this.’

‘You know who’s going to be really damn happy about this?’

‘Who?’

‘Nicolaisen.’

Both of us fall out laughing, because every year, he had been, if something came up open on Cal’s staff, no matter what it was, he had thrown my name in there. In hindsight, it was great for Erik to continue to push my name and try to give me opportunity. I think a part of it, with coach Wilcox getting a deeper understanding of me comes from my relationship with Nicolaisen, their relationship, talking to him and knowing what kind of guy he is, painted the picture of what type of guy that I was.

That piece there, and I talk about it within recruiting but also within the profession, is that it’s all about relationships, those that I built over the years with my players prepared me to be in the situation at Cal. I tell my guys that I didn’t get to Cal because I’m the best coach in the world, I got to Cal because the players responded to the way we do things, the way we coach, the way we treat them on a daily basis, the interactions we have. I got to Cal because of those relationships and the relationships I’ve made in the coaching world as well. Chris Petersen, he gave me a great charge in being his assistant DFO (director of football operation) and we’d remained in contact through the years at Cal Poly. Aside from my wife, he was the last person I talked to before I went into my interview with coach Wilcox, I was talking to him about what to think. He gave me some great information, but the biggest thing he said was ‘you’re ready for this, be you, tell him how you’re going to do things. You know how you operate, you know how you do things, don’t try to impress him and be something that you’re not.’ That was something that Dirk Koetter had told me when I went to interview for another job.

My relationship with Chris Strausser, he was the offensive line coach when I was there at Boise, coach Strausser’s daughter interned for me at Cal Poly, so I’d see him when he came down in the offseason or to recruit. Coach Strausser actually worked with coach Musgrave on the Denver Broncos. Scott Huff, talking to him, coach Wilcox and him are friends from back in the day, and he’s friends with coach Ragle as well. Those guys speaking up for me, Keith Bhonapha, he had good relationships with everyone on staff, him and Gerald Alexander were close, and the relationships with those guys, and there were even more that all played a vital role in me having the opportunity to join coach Wilcox’s staff at Cal.

When you build those relationships, you foster those relationships and you do it the right way, they work for you in a number of ways, it’s not always getting yourself to another job or getting a young man to your university, but you have a relationship that’s going to build with you, you want to see people be successful. I’ve recruited a ton of kids, not all of them have come to play for me, but those relationships have been fruitful in plenty of ways. I was in the airport this year, just gotten the job at Cal and this guy comes up to me (and says) ‘Coach AT?’

‘Yeah?’

He says ‘I went to Harvard-Westlake high school, you recruited me and I never forget the times you were talking to me, I didn’t end up going (to Cal Poly), but you were awesome on the phone and telling me about the recruiting process, I really appreciated that.’ We sat there and shot the breeze for probably a half hour, this is a kid I hadn’t talked to in six years. Those relationships you make, on the coaching side or throughout the process, they mean so much, and for me, that’s the way I try to develop the relationships with young men that we want to be in our program at Cal. We want to build stronger relationships and let them know that we are invested in them, but also how invested I am in seeing them grow to the men they want to become.

Those relationships, I think, are what will make the difference for me, in a young man choosing Cal versus another school, not to mention all the great things about Cal. Working for or being around coach Wilcox and his coaching staff, at the top public institution in the world, all the work we do on a daily basis to understand the culture, all of those things add into it, and that relationship part can be the difference between coming to play at this place or going somewhere else.

TT: How did the initial process of getting hooked up with Wilcox and at Cal go?

AT: When coach Walsh (retired), I was looking at what was going to be the next move for my family and myself, and I’d gotten word that coach Baldwin was in the running for the Cal Poly job. I’ve known coach Baldwin, I didn’t know him very well personally, but he knows me and I know him. My initial reaction is that I want to stay at Cal Poly, because this place had been so great for us. One of my sons is special needs, he has epilepsy, and we had been so fortunate to grow here and have a great support system with his needs and our needs here.

For me, it was not about going to chase another job or see what opportunities were out there, staying at Cal Poly is going to be a great place for my family to continue to grow and it’d be a great chance for me to have a new chapter, and work with coach Baldwin. I knew when coach Baldwin came down here, I knew there was going to be a chance that there was another opening if certain people left from Cal, but I didn’t want to push at that. Coach Edwards does come down to Cal Poly and the running back job is open.

I’m not trying to burn this bridge at Cal Poly by trying to go after this Cal job because I don’t know how it’s going to be perceived. I sat back and went at the job at Cal Poly, and was fortunate enough for coach Baldwin to keep me on staff at the time.

Probably a week or so after that, I got a call from Andrew Browning (Cal’s DL coach). I’d known Browning for a number of years, both of us are from Oregon, played at Boise State, and Browning was the first person who called me and said ‘we’ve got an opening at running back, are you interested?’ I was like ‘yes, I am.’ He says ‘someone’s going to reach out to you here and get it going, but I’ll bring your name up and see where it goes from there. I’m just geeked at that point and a week goes by, it may not have been a week but it seemed like a week after that first phone call, because I’m grinning ear to ear, and we’re in a staff meeting at Cal Poly. We’re going over the roster, this is pretty much an entire new staff at Cal Poly, I’m going through the ins and outs of guys, their class, their background. I get a text during the meeting ‘Hey, can you talk? - Coach Wilcox.” I text him back, tell him I’ll give him a call when I’m out of the meeting, everybody starts filing out of the room and coach Baldwin tells me to hang back for a minute. I’m thinking maybe he wants clarity on one of the players. He says ‘hey, did coach Wilcox text you?’

‘He did.’

‘Okay, good’

He knew, and I got on the phone with coach Wilcox, and we set up a time to interview at the Coaches Convention (in Nashville). That wasn’t a long conversation, probably a 15 minute conversation talking back and forth, and that’s when everything got wild. Our flight got delayed, the person we were flying down with wanted to go on a different day, and I had to change my interview time with coach Wilcox two or three times, but we set the interview for Monday morning. As we get going to Nashville, we were flying with an alum from Cal Poly, we get on the plane, it’s four new guys from the staff, myself, and Mr. Jones (the alum) on the plane and I got hit with some flu bug. I’ve never felt the flu like this in my life, it crushed me, and I have to engage with them but I just want to go to sleep. We get to Nashville, no sleep, then we’re going out to eat. I just want to go back to my room and sleep, but with a new staff, I’ve got to hang out with these guys, build relationships with them and keep growing this deal. At the convention, we’re waiting to go out and have dinner and there comes coach Wilcox and Angus McClure (right after McClure was hired), I say hello, little pleasantries, and then Chris Strausser and his wife Kathy are in there as well. Coach Strausser says to come over and say hi, I sit down with them, coach Wilcox is sitting on the other side of him, but we don’t really talk, just little pleasantries.

From there, I’ve got to go to dinner with these guys, I just want to sleep, I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to do anything, so I go, do the dinner, it was a great steak dinner, but the worst dinner I’ve had in my life, because I felt so bad, but I had to put on the good face because they know how I am, I talk a bit of noise, and coach Edwards and I had a bit of banter going on, jabbing him a little bit and he’s jabbing me. I stepped out and like I said earlier, talked to Chris Petersen on the phone, wishing me good luck on the interview. My wife, God bless her soul, she had a packet of Emergen-C, Theraflu, and other stuff sent to the hotel, and I pumped myself (with it) just so I could sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night, I’m dripping with sweat, I think I broke my fever, and my body is aching and sore. I get up in the morning, take a bunch of stuff and (tell myself) ‘you’ve got about two hours, you’ve got to be good for two hours.’ I don’t know how long the interview is going to be but I’ve got two hours. Throw on my suit, meet with coach Wilcox, go up to the room. In the elevator, I didn’t feel good, but once I got into the room, I felt great. I go sit in there with coach Wilcox and coach Musgrave and we go back and forth for about 40 minutes. Then coach Sirmon comes in and we go for another hour or so, watching film, talking.

We get done, I say ‘I appreciate it, thanks.’ Walk out, shake hands, we’ll see what’s going to happen. I get on the phone with my wife, she says ‘how did it go?’

‘I think I did a great job, but all I know how to do is be me, we’ve been through these things before, so it is what it is, but I put our best foot forward and showed who I am and who we are as a family and the way we operate.’

In the middle of that conversation, coach Wilcox called me back, said ‘I need you to come meet me,’ and offered me the job then.

TT: Good deal, it’s like you had your Michael Jordan flu-game performance…

AT: It was, if you will, a flu game performance. I don’t know if they knew I was sick, but I felt like crap, I felt like crap the whole time, but we’re here now, so it was worth it and then some.