Canzano: JaMarcus Shephard is on a journey
"I just knew he'd make it."
A snowstorm hit Northeast Indiana on Monday. It caused a two-hour school delay. But once the physical education classes at Jefferson Middle School got going, they operated with some extra bounce.
“That little kid never let anyone outwork him,” the PE teacher told me. “I just knew he’d make it.”
Oregon State hired JaMarcus Shephard as head football coach over the weekend. He’ll be introduced at a campus news conference at noon on Tuesday.
Back at his old middle school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, his former PE teacher, Joan Aughenbaugh, dug through a pile of old yearbooks on Monday morning. Then, she told her students about the skinny kid with the big smile in her class all those years ago. She knew he was destined for big things.
Oregon State circulated a video on Monday of Shephard, 42, arriving on campus in a Nissan Armada with his wife and three children. The SUV was parked on the curb in front of the Valley Football Center.
The school band played the fight song. Photographers snapped pictures. Athletic Director Scott Barnes slapped backs, shook hands, and said to the family, “Come on in.”
Maybe you saw that scene and wondered how far Shephard might go.
Me?
I thought about how far he’s come.
“JaMarcus didn’t have a lot,” Ms. Aughenbaugh told me. “He lived in poverty. He didn’t let it stop him. He didn’t make excuses. He just worked harder than everyone else.”-
In the 1990s, Jefferson Middle School bused students to campus from all over the region. JaMarcus Shephard was one of those kids. He’d climb on, find a seat, and look out the window, watching a blur of affluent neighborhoods on the way to school.
Shephard beat the odds to get the Oregon State job, didn’t he?
His predecessor, Trent Bray, had never been a head coach before. Bray struggled with the CEO portion of the job and posted a 5-14 record before he got fired.
Bray knew football. He was an excellent defensive coordinator. But he struggled with media appearances and fumbled conversations with donors. The head coaching duties swallowed him whole some days. Not everyone is a good CEO, and Barnes didn’t want to live through that mess again.
Said one long-time campus insider as the search for a new coach began: “I’ll be stunned if he goes with someone who hasn’t been a head coach.”
Montana State’s Brent Vigen? North Dakota State’s Tim Polasek? UConn’s Jim Mora? Or maybe, eventually, Cal’s Justin Wilcox?
That’s where OSU’s search was headed. Right up until the grinning kid from Ms. Aughenbaugh’s PE class came bounding into the interviews. Shephard didn’t just open a crack in the door. He blew it off the hinges.
Prepared.
Enthusiastic.
Shephard attacked the interview. He shared his life story and sucked the search committee into his vision for the program. Shephard spoke of building locker-room culture and outlined his recruiting philosophy. By the time he was finished with his presentation, he’d won the committee over.
Said one member of OSU’s search committee: “He interviewed better than anyone. He was prepared, and he was succinct in his answers. He wanted the job. Sometimes you can just tell when you are interviewing somebody. Some people ‘take’ an interview, some people ‘want’ the interview. Do this enough, and you can see how people show up.”
Shephard told me in a phone conversation a couple of weeks earlier that he badly wanted the job at Oregon State. He asked smart questions about the inner workings of the OSU athletic department. He picked my brain on the hierarchy of the new-world Pac-12. He wanted to know what went down.
It reminded me of the first time I spoke on the phone with Oregon coach Dan Lanning.
I shared that with Ms. Aughenbaugh.
“I’m not one bit surprised,” she said. “That’s who JaMarcus Shephard is. He’s always worked so hard for everything he has and everything that he’s achieved.”
Everyone likes to talk about Shephard’s time as an assistant at Alabama and Washington. But it’s his earlier years that got my attention.
Shephard attended DePauw University, a Division III college with 1,800 students, on an academic scholarship. He majored in kinesiology and sports medicine. After graduation, he got a job with the NCAA’s Education Services Division. Later, Shephard went to work at the National Center for Drug-Free Sport, where he trained supervisors for the NFL’s drug-testing program.
Shephard eventually gravitated to the playing field. He networked his way to a spot as a graduate assistant on Willie Taggart’s staff at Western Kentucky. He and his wife lived on $12,000 a year in salary and a tuition waiver.
They must have starved.
Mike Leach reached out to Shephard not long after that. The two men had never even met. But Leach needed a receivers coach at Washington State, and the two men got on the phone for a job interview.
Leach didn’t play college football himself. He was an outlier who refused to conform to industry norms. His thinking was frequently non-traditional and creative as a result. Leach loved that Shephard had an unorthodox career path and offered him the job in Pullman.
So yeah.
JaMarcus Shephard will be introduced as the head football coach in Corvallis on Tuesday. His wife and three children will be alongside for the event. Later in the day, he’ll join me for a 1-on-1 interview on the radio show. And that proud middle school in Indiana and its 720 students will walk through the snow and celebrate it all.
I suppose Oregon State could have played it safe. It could have hired a candidate with previous head coaching experience. There’s risk, but Shephard comes with a high ceiling. He isn’t a poor kid looking out the window of a school bus anymore. The view from his office window looks down at Reser Stadium. I’m interested in the energy he’ll bring to that place next season.
Ms. Aughenbaugh was in her 20s and just starting as a teacher when JaMarcus Shephard walked into her physical education class for the first time.
She’s 60 now.
“I love what I do,” she told me. “I knew he’d make it. He deserves it. He did the work. Seeing kids like JaMarcus succeed is why I do it.”
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Just what the Beavers needed: a hard working, cerebral coach who wants to be there. Thanks for the back story. Beaver 🦫 fans should be excited about Coach Shepherd.
Thanks John! I appreciate the way you tell a story. This was a more thoughtful and creative way to introduce coach than the typical coverage. Great job.