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.

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

TT: What sports did you play growing up?

AT: When I was a kid growing up, we did a little bit of everything. We played basketball in the neighborhood, we played football in the neighborhood, we played kickball. We were outdoor kids, it was the days where you would get out in the street and find a couple guys in the neighborhood, you go door to door ‘can such and such come out and play?’ And you’d play, we had the neighborhood and whoever had the biggest backyard or whoever had a basketball hoop, we’d go there or to the school across the street.

I did a lot of different things, but I really got initiated into organized sports through a program, NYSP, National Youth Sports Program. It was run locally at Concordia College (in Portland, where Thompson is from), which was two blocks away from my house. They had sports programs that they would take kids to. Every day, they would have things going on, this was during the summer, they would have a group that they would have a group that they would take to Matt Dishman Community Center, which was one of the better community centers in Portland that has a swimming pool, you’d go over there for learning how to swim. They had a gymnastics deal, where they’d take guys over to Whitaker Middle School, which had a gymnastics setup. If you wanted to do basketball, you’d stayed there (as well). I bounced around doing that, and you had to be 10 years old to do that, but I wasn’t letting that hold me back. So at (age) 7, I went and filled out the papers, said I was 10, and joined in and got going. It was pretty cool to be able to do that with the older kids in my family and in the neighborhood who were doing this. I really took a liking to gymnastics at the time, and at a young age, I wanted to be a gymnast.

Eventually, putting down that I was 10 on those papers caught up to me, someone who knew me told me ‘you’re not 10,’ and I said ‘I am 10,’ (he said again) ‘you’re not 10,’ and I kind of got my world crushed, got sent home. I’ll never forget, walking down the hill, down 29th street to our house on 29th and Deacon, and just crying. My world was crushed, because everybody in our neighborhood was a little older than me, that was the group that I hung out with, so all of a sudden, I was relegated to sitting at home with a couple of younger cousins or my grandmother, whoever was there. There was a little humility thrown at me right there.

TT: When did you really get into playing football?

AT: I didn’t really get into playing organized football until I was in the sixth grade. My mom didn’t want me to play, but she gave in. I got to play for the Whitaker Warriors, I still have some pictures from those times that have made it through the years. It was the neighborhood middle school, but kids from all over played on that team. Some of my good friends in life were some of the kids I played with from my first years there playing on that team in the sixth grade, then moving on with seventh and eighth grade. It was a great time, those three years playing organized football taught me how to play the game.

Moving into my eighth grade year, I was starting to come into my own as a player a little bit, and this coach there, he was an awesome coach and an even better man. He would take all the kids, pick them up for games and practice, take them home from practice, we were getting out of practice at 7 or 8 at night and he would load everybody up in his truck, drop everybody off at home and make sure everybody’s okay. He worked for the bus company in Portland, and he would bring a city bus every weekend for our games. If parents couldn’t make it, they had to work, he loaded everybody up and you had a ride to the game. If you needed a ride home, he was going to take the bus back down the main streets, it might have been a block from your house, but he was going to take everybody home. Seeing the way he gave up himself for us, you wanted to do anything you could for that guy.

He taught me a lesson about one of the things I preach to all the guys that I’ve coached as running backs and really in the game of football, and it’s that you’ve got to play hard. He taught me about running hard, running angry, and wanting to put pressure on people, he wanted to light a fire under me. He’s standing there in front of me, I’m holding the ball, he says ‘hit me.’

I kinda push him a little bit. He says again ‘hit me.’ I give him a little push again, and he yells ‘hit me!’ I give him a little shove with my forearm. He slapped me, and I unloaded on him. He was like ‘that’s what I want, that’s how you have to run. These defenders are going to try to come at you in different types of ways, and I want you to do that right there.’ He wasn’t trying to demean, belittle me, abuse me or anything, he was trying to tell me ‘if you’re trying to play this game, you better play it the way it’s supposed to be played. Play hard, play physical.’

That was one of the bigger lessons that I learned as a running back, that you’ve got to attack defenders, you’ve got to go. It was an odd way of learning it, but I’ll never forget it.

That was my introduction to football, my years at Whitaker and then my time at Jesuit High School really brought out the best in me in understanding the team game, understanding that you have to learn, appreciate those around you, and understand sacrifice. We kind of live by the motto at Jesuit ‘men and women for others,’ you’re always giving up yourself, and when I look at those years at Jesuit and looking at that saying, that’s what (the coach from Whitaker) was as well, he was a man for others. He was there to help the kids there to get a great start in football, get balance in life and to keep structure, not getting caught up in what was going on at the time in the city of Portland. He was trying to provide an avenue for us to be safe, be productive and be positive.

With the growth I had at Jesuit, coach (Ken) Potter, a guy that’s still the head coach there, great man, love him and I love what he brought to the table for us, trying to teach us to be great men, men for others, to get a better understanding of the of the team game, but also to sacrifice for others and to put people away in games. He was big on going for the jugular, I’ll never back away from that. In the game of football, when you get a chance to put somebody away, you do it, you don’t wait for it.

TT: Why running back for you and why coach running backs?

Running backs for me, it really started with watching football on TV, you’d see the ball go to the running backs. The ball moved around in the air a little bit, but it was going through the running backs. When you grow up watching Marcus Allen, Bo Jackson, Barry Sanders, Walter Payton, you watch these guys and they were the focal point of it. It resonated seeing those guys, and as I got to the backyard playing, there wasn’t much throwing going on. You’re playing in a 20x15 yard backyard, you get the ball handed off and you’ve got to run through some guys, make people miss to get where you want to go. Throughout the years, I felt that (the position) fit naturally with me.

My first years playing football, I played running back, and that’s what everybody did, running back, quarterback, a few wide receivers and on defense. I played, in my first three years, running back, tight end, and one year we rotated our starting backfield to the offensive line and the starting offensive line to the backfield. You did a bit of everything, but it was what really felt comfortable for me and I had success with it early on, I wanted to be a running back. I had a chance to watch some guys that I grew up around, some family members, a guy by the name of Matt Jones, who went to the University of Washington and was a family friend, I watched him play and seeing him from go from a running back to a fullback up there, it was pretty cool seeing the involvement in the game, having the ball in your hands and wanting to do whatever you can to get your team into the end zone.

With coaching running backs, with playing the position, it’s a passion of mine. I feel I have an opportunity to not only impact the game in various ways by coaching the position, I truly believe that as a running back you have to know just as much as the quarterback, just as much as the centers, just as much as the wideouts, you have to know everything. You have to know the pass protections, you have to know the blocking schemes, you have to know your landmarks, your spots, your tracks, whatever it may be within the running game, but you’ve also got to know the passing game and what routes are being run. Moving into various alignments, you may be running those routes or where you might be in the progression. There’s a lot of things with it, so I’m not a guy that thinks that running back is just getting the ball handed off to you, there’s a lot of preparation involved in it, you have to be a thinker on the field and you’ve got to be a great reactor as well. I try to teach them the big picture, I want to make sure they know what’s going on, how it’s going on, and why it’s going on, because that’s going to give them the opportunity to be successful.

TT: You went to Boise State after Jesuit HS, how did that process go for you?

AT: I started getting the letters in the mail my freshman year. I was playing a game at home my freshman year in high school, and we had some seniors who were getting recruited pretty heavily and I’ll never forget somebody telling me ‘hey did you see that coach up there watching the game?’ I didn’t see him, but I had a pretty good game, it was my first or second game as a freshman and I scored three or four touchdowns, they were like ‘oh there was a coach from USC up there.’ He was there to touch base with our head coach and was going to watch (the varsity) game that night.

A couple weeks later I got a questionnaire deal, to which I thought ‘oh, this is cool, I got a letter from a school.’ My sophomore year I played a lot on varsity, I started a good chunk of the season, so things started picking up. I thought I was getting recruited, I was getting a bunch of letters my sophomore and junior year across the country. I was filling out a million questionnaires and that’s how I memorized my social security number.

I thought it was pretty cool, I went to University of Washington’s junior day, it was relatively close to us. I would go pretty much every week during my junior or senior year, go down to U of O or Oregon State, take in the game and do the facility tour. It was pretty cool seeing that and doing those things, but it wasn’t to the extent that it is now. Looking back, I should have done more of that, went and do what kids do now, take a weekend and drive over to a place and go see it.

As my senior year unfolded, I thought I’m going to have a lot of different options, so I started telling some schools that I don’t know if I’m really interested. Unbeknownst to me, all these letters and calls and things I’m getting (aren’t offers). I had a scholarship offer from Washington, Boise State, had one to Portland State, and I honed in that I was going to University of Washington. I already made up my mind. As the recruiting process went on, I got a call from Washington, it was on Christmas Day or the day after Christmas. Randy Hart, he gave me a call, we’d been talking for a long time, and he told me they no longer had a scholarship for me. They’d given my scholarship to someone else, and that rocked my world. I just kind of shut down for a while, it really crushed me.

Things picked back up three weeks later, took an official to Boise State, Idaho wanted me to take an official visit up there, but things didn’t work out to take a trip up there. I ended up taking a trip to Boise, Portland State was there in the backyard, but I knew that I wanted to do something different, I needed to grow up and get away a little bit. That was probably the best decision for me, with some of the guys I met on that recruiting trip, the time we spent together, it was a group of guys I wanted to be around.

I signed with Boise State, but I ended up having to greyshirt, it was one of the first years they had the NCAA sliding scale, and my GPA didn’t coincide with my SAT score. So they asked me if I wanted to do, what was at the time Prop 48 (sit out and finish up requirements at the school like Russell White did at Cal), I said I wasn’t really interested in that, I’ll sit out and take the test. A couple schools started calling me asking if I wanted to come in, they could get me in now, but it was all under the guise of being a Prop 48, and it was best for me and my family to stay on the path of going to Boise State.

At the end of season, the head coach that had recruited me at Boise State, he had passed away, he had come down with cancer, Pokey Allen. At the end of that season, they released the entire coaching staff that was there, and I’m wondering am I even going to have the opportunity to go to Boise State with what has transpired. They hired a guy by the name of Houston Nutt, coach Nutt and staff gave me a call and said ‘we want you here.’ I end up going into Boise with coach Nutt in January of 97. It was a crazy experience, having that all change and going with people who I didn’t really know anything about, hadn’t built relationships with them, but went in there and had a decent year, didn’t redshirt, played a lot of special teams and actually moved to defense my freshman year (this was the year where Boise transitioned from what would’ve been an FCS program to an FBS program). That was a humbling experience, but I was taught over the years to do what you do to help the team win. I was able to do some things to help our team win, we didn’t win a lot, but we had changed a little bit. At the end of the year, coach Nutt got the job at Arkansas, and that was my introduction into coaching change. It went from being recruited by one staff, to another staff bringing me in there, to that staff leaving, and now we’re going to have another.

My sophomore year, Dirk Koetter got the head job, and as far as my next true growth and evolution in learning the game, learning how to prepare and being detailed, it happened under Dirk Koetter. He was just spot on with the way that he operated, the way that he called the game, the way that he prepared us, we were just ready to go. We had a growth year in 98, where we really didn’t do anything, but the next two years we hit it full stride, we won 10 games each of the next two years. Anything that Dirk said was going to happen, as far as what teams are going to run or what teams were going to do, it happened, and before we knew it, we were up on a lot of teams, up by 21 points. That was our deal, especially at home, the blue (turf) is worth 14 points, we’re up on you.

Those years there from 98 through the end of my playing career formulated my mind as to that I understood the game differently and I felt coaching was something that I would want to do at some point. I remember that first summer of 98, before you could do the summer practices, we couldn’t do anything but lift and run. They couldn’t even give us access to the stadium to do our own player run practices, so we went to a place called Manitou park. Ask coach Yates about Manitou park and doing our own practices in the park. Can you imagine a division one team practicing on their own in the park? No coaches, just players out there. I neve forget being out there, calling plays on one side, then on the other side, saying ‘hey defense, run this coverage.’ A guy I played with, Bryan Johnson, coined it for me, ‘coach AT, what are we running?’ That was when it resonated with that ‘I know the game, now can I get it across to people.’

Coach Koetter and his staff really helped me grow, in my latter part of my junior and senior year, I’d go to the office (Monday evenings), I’d sit down with my position coach, coach (Tom) Nordquist, we’d go over different things that we were putting in, the defenses we were going to face, and to give me an opportunity to give input about what I thought, what we were seeing, and details, footwork, and other things for the running back room. That was awesome that they gave that opportunity at that time, and that’s kind of what you do now, you encourage them to come in if they have the time outside. Doing that then was another way of me having the next step of a coach not telling me what comes next, but being involved in the process.

TT: A lot of the coaches on staff, with maybe a couple exceptions are either tied to Dirk Koetter or the Boise teams from the mid 90s to late 00s. What is it about that Boise tree that has such an influence?

AT: I think one of the bigger things that came to me from there is that everybody who was at Boise from the mid to late 90s to the mid to late 2000s, everybody had a chip on his shoulder about something, and we played into that, we talked about always having that chip on shoulder, talked about somebody always looked at you as either smaller or not as fast, not as big, whatever it may be, and we always had that chip and played into it.

We were always out to prove something, and we had to prove it not only on the field but in the way we prepared. When you prepare diligently and you prepare with detail, you get to show everybody what you’ve done on Saturdays. You only get so many games in your career as a player or a coach, you’re only guaranteed 13. There’s so many other days throughout the year that you’re working to get to that Saturday. So when you do all the little things necessary that are preached to you day in and day out, when you do the little things, the big picture takes care of itself.

When you are in high-energy, high intensity practices, the game is easier for you. There was always competitive settings at practice all the time, you were competing, because if you were going to bring out the best in each other in practice, the other team wasn’t going to be ready for it, because they weren’t preparing like we were. That was our chip on our shoulder, that we have to prepare like this and show up like this, because everybody thinks we’re not this, we’re not that. That’s something that has carried on throughout the years, we’re going to outwork, outthink and outplay our opponents. It was still prevalent when I went back to Boise State in the summer of 2007 as assistant director of football operations, it was the same mentality Chris Petersen had brought into the fold as the head coach as well. Not only was it familiar with me, it was encouraging to see that what we’d been a part of to put together was still there at Boise.