Ex-Boise State player flopped in his first coaching job. Now he’s on the verge of a title.
Sherm Blaser started his coaching career with all the bona fides and confidence in the world.
Dirk Koetter recruited him to play at Boise State. The tight end played under Dan Hawkins and Chris Petersen. And Bryan Harsin was his position coach during the Broncos’ rise to national prominence.
How hard could coaching high school football be?
He quickly learned how hard.
Blaser went 1-7 in his first stint as head coach at Rexburg’s Madison High. He boosted turnout in a struggling program but couldn’t make a dent in the win-loss column. So he resigned at the end of the year, returning to the Treasure Valley and rejoining David Young’s staff at Skyview.
He feared his days as a head coach were over. But he soon worked his way into another shot. And then another. And now he has accomplished what was long thought impossible, lifting Kuna — a long-term doormat in the 4A Southern Idaho Conference — into a state championship game.
Blaser leads No. 1-ranked Kuna (12-0) into its first state title game at the 4A level this weekend. A victory over No. 2 Blackfoot (11-1) at 6 p.m. Saturday at Pocatello’s Holt Arena would clinch the program’s first state title since 1991 and the first perfect season in school history.
“I honestly went into (my first job) going: ‘I know everything. I’ve got all the answers,’ ” Blaser said. “I was excited to go over there. And then when I got there, I realized I don’t know anything.”
He returned to the Treasure Valley not ready to absorb what happened at Madison. But three years at Skyview and several long conversations with Young honed his focus and opened his eyes to everything that came with being a head football coach.
Blaser, 37, never lacked any football knowledge. But Young points out that is never the problem for talented players transitioning into coaching. Playing and coaching are two different skills.
Young compares a head coaching job to becoming a parent. You can read all the books and take all the classes you want. But you’ll never know what it’s like until you do it yourself.
“You can shadow head coaches. You can talk to head coaches. You can have 30 years of coaching experience as an assistant,” Young said. “But you don’t truly know what it takes until you become one because there’s so many pieces behind the scenes that people don’t realize.
“... He was a young coach, just gung-ho and ready to conquer the world. And then he realized how big that job was and just what the job is to be a head coach. He came back and was definitely humbled.”
Blaser dedicated himself to studying how Young ran Skyview’s powerhouse 4A program inside and out. How did he structure practices? How did he plan road trips? How did he tweak his message when it didn’t land the first time? How did he balance all the administrative duties that come with a head coaching position?
After three years at Skyview, Blaser got another chance to lead his own program at Melba. He took Melba to the playoffs three times in three seasons and posted a 15-12 record. That led to an even bigger challenge at Kuna, which remained mired near the bottom of the 4A SIC since joining the classification in 2000.
Ian Smart and Lee Leslie, who has McCall-Donnelly in the 2A title game, pulled the Kavemen out of the cellar and made them competitive. But Kuna had few applicants for the position three years ago and entered this fall with only a single playoff victory since 1998.
That didn’t stop Blaser and the Kavemen from setting high goals. Even after missing the playoffs his first two years, he sat down with his team before the season and implored them to dream big. By the end of the meeting, three goals emerged from the group — win a league title, win a state title and go undefeated.
Kuna had never won an SIC title. It had never posted a perfect season. And it hadn’t won a state title in 28 years. But none of that mattered to Blaser, who wanted his team to aim high.
The Kavemen already rolled to their first SIC league title. And a win Saturday would take care of the final two goals.
“He’s given us hope,” junior quarterback Sean Austin said. “He’s led our team to an undefeated record. He’s coached perfectly so far … and it’s really reflected on everybody’s character.”
Blaser still remains the oversized, goofy kid he was when he first went to Madison, complete with the backwards baseball hat and shorts no matter the temperature. That personality and honesty attract players to his program. But he’s also grown up and learned how to apply all the lessons he’s absorbed over the years.
Tasked this week with preparing his players for a stage they’ve never played on, he returned to the meditation he learned under Hawkins. He gathered all the Kavemen at Wednesday’s practice and had them visualize what winning a state championship Saturday would look like, down to his postgame speech and the celebratory hugs.
The 20-year-old Blaser scoffed at Hawkins’ meditations. But he now realizes their purpose of making the unfamiliar familiar, and he has incorporated that into his growing set of coaching tools.
He learned his attention to detail from Petersen and Harsin. Young taught him how to run a program. And his high school coach, Mike Glenn at Eagle, showed him how to be tough when needed.
Nine years after struggling as a first-time head coach, he’s finally taken all those lessons to heart and made them his own.
“Every head coach has to go through that,” Blaser said. “Some go through it really quick, and some have to go through a little longer process like I did with a lot of trial and error.”
