Rocky Mountain finds next football coach. He’s led one Idaho team to new heights
Gary Thorson came to Idaho with a reputation for rebuilding struggling football programs.
He lived up to the billing last fall, leading Ridgevue High to the best season in school history. Now he’ll take on a new challenge, inheriting one of the state’s premier programs at Rocky Mountain.
The West Ada school board finalized Thorson’s hiring Monday, naming the 57-year-old as the fourth football coach in Rocky Mountain history. He replaces Scott Criner, who retired after the season.
“All the places I’ve been before, they’ve been schools that were struggling, and it was a rebuilding process,” Thorson said. “This is a completely different thing. It’s a different puzzle to work on.”
Thorson engineered one of the state’s biggest turnarounds last fall, leading Ridgevue to its first winning season (6-4) and its first playoff appearance since opening 10 years ago. The 5A program had never won more than three games in a season before his arrival.
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Thorson said he had no plans to leave Ridgevue. But he added Rocky Mountain presented a new challenge and an opportunity too enticing to pass up.
Criner and former coach Chris Culig built the Grizzlies into perennial state title contenders in Idaho’s top classification. Rocky Mountain won three state championships in the past eight years, and it reached the semifinals 11 times in the past 13 years.
“I walked around the grounds over Thanksgiving break,” Thorson said. “And you can just feel that sense of pride, that commitment to excellence to be great, as you walk around that place.”
Thorson brings a 96-57 (.627) career record to Rocky Mountain, and he won five league titles in 15 seasons while spending most of his career inheriting struggling programs.
His best seasons came in 2010 and ‘11 at Dayton, where he went 22-3 and reached the state semifinals and championship game in Oregon’s fourth-largest classification. But Thorson is also known for the quick turnaround he’s engineered at multiple schools.
He led four-win improvements in his first season at Ridgevue and Oregon’s Sisters and Dayton high schools. Oregon’s Dallas High also saw a two-win improvement in Year 1.
“We looked at all the stops he made,” Rocky Mountain Athletic Director Troy Rice said. “He went into several rebuilds at Ridgevue and in Oregon, and he turned those schools around. We felt he had the skills to come in here and maintain what we’ve had, and improve upon it.”
Thorson first began looking at Rocky Mountain after the 2024 season, when he and his wife started eyeing a move to Idaho. He spoke with Criner about an assistant coaching position. While he instead landed at Ridgevue, he bookmarked the team’s website and started studying what made Rocky Mountain so successful.
Thorson said he knows Rocky Mountain doesn’t need a rebuild. He doesn’t plan to make wholesale changes and will retain 90% of the coaching staff, including Andre Banks as offensive coordinator and Quintin Mikell as defensive coordinator. But he will add his own twist to the program.
“That puzzle of putting something together and adding to what they got going, that excites me as a coach,” Thorson said. “It’s been that way everywhere I’ve been. Everyone has something different that can be done or can be done better, or maybe you add this.
“They have a great staff in place. They are the kind of guys where it’s going to be my job to say, ‘OK, here’s the plan,’ and turn them loose and let them go do their thing.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2026 at 2:01 PM.
