“Hold on,” Jerry Harris says, “I have to call you back.”
It’s the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms calling, and when the ATF calls, you don’t want to leave them on hold.
Pusch Ridge Christian’s first-year head coach, you see, is in the drilling and blasting business by day. Which makes it ironic that, given the chance to blow up his coaching staff and start anew, he chose not to press the giant TNT button.
Anyone who tinkers with a state champion must have their wires crossed, and Jerry Harris isn’t that guy.
“I did feel an obligation to the program, feeling like I helped to build what we’d achieved, and an obligation to the players, to keep things the same,” said Harris, whose 4-2 Lions take on Sabino on Friday night.
“I felt it would be tragic for the school — Troy had done a tremendous job, in terms of everything from … well, everything — and I didn’t want to see that go away. I certainly was going to put my thumbprint on some things, but scheme-wise, what we saw between the white lines is what you see now.”
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The Troy to whom Harris refers is Troy Cropp, the former Pusch Ridge head coach who gave up the gig after last season’s improbable Class 3A title run.
Cropp’s impending retirement was the best-kept secret on the Lions staff last season; Harris said the coach told him about his future plans in the car on the way to their Week 3 junior varsity game last season. The Lions’ varsity team was 1-1 at the time and bore little resemblance to an eventual state champion, even though they’d come off back-to-back 9-2 seasons. That they’d finish the season 13-1, winning their final 13 games, was a testament to what Cropp had built in just four years.
Harris wasn’t about to blast out a good thing.
And it’s not as if he’d been seeking the position for decades, just itching to make a staff his own.
Harris has been involved with Pusch Ridge’s high school program for only three years, after working with the school’s middle school football team, and he was hesitant to even make that jump. He puts it bluntly — “I had a concern about my own competence, and again, the ongoing struggle to balance work, family and coaching,” he said — but that didn’t dissuade Cropp, who quickly named Harris his defensive coordinator.
“He kind of bait-and-switched me a bit and made me DC the very first year in high school football,” Harris said. “You go from stepping into water to jumping into the deep end with a cinder block. It was baptism by fire.”
But Cropp knew what he was looking for, and he played an instrumental role in Harris’ ascension to head coach, as well.
“Jerry Harris is the type of gentleman that everyone else on staff was good following,” PR athletic director Lonnie Tvrdy said. “If I’d have brought someone from the outside, I would’ve lost some of the coaches. Jerry knows our culture, coached the middle school, he was the right-hand man. For me, it was a no-brainer; I knew I wouldn’t even want to interview anyone else, and Troy’s recommendation was this is the guy to look at.”
Harris is humble by nature and plays down his football expertise, but it’s there.
Harris played Division III college football at the prestigious Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and he jokes, “that should put the fear of God in you right there. Oh, we’re going to play a nerd school, and they’re going to have their slide-rules out and stab us in the eye.”
He’s as much a student of leadership as he is linebackers. He says of himself, “While I’m not the kind of football junkie you normally find … I do make sure I’m competent. What I find in football — and maybe this is naïve on my part — is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Many of the new spread and run-pass, option-type offenses all have roots to the Wing-T and Wishbone. We’re old-school at PR.
“Do I lie awake at night trying to dream up new schemes? I don’t. We do what we do.”
Halfway through the season, at 4-2, the results have been solid.
There have been disappointments — a 31-20 loss to Catalina Foothills in Week 5 stands out — but also triumphs, such as last week’s 48-0 demolition of Empire.
Demolition. Explosives guy. It works.
“My rule for myself is I don’t beat myself for making mistakes unless I make them twice. I’m still on a pretty steep learning curve,” he said. “There are things associated with being a head coach I didn’t anticipate. Time constraints, admin duties. Nothing that makes me want to slam my whistle down and walk out.”
Players have quickly caught on to the adjustment.
It’s not every day a state champion needs a new leader, but Harris has stepped up.
“I absolutely say there was continuity,” senior middle linebacker Remington Vail said. “I don’t think the team skipped a bit at all. We stuck with the same traditions, regimens, schemes. It’s been extremely important.”
Above all, his perspective has been clear. He has a wonderful family of his own, a wife, Amy, of 23 years and three kids, including son Turner, a junior who plays for the Lions. Though Harris never anticipated the gig, he’s in it for the right reasons.
“High school football coaching is what I do, it’s not who I am,” Harris said. “I wouldn’t want to be the water boy at another program, and I don’t mean that to be derogatory. But what we’re trying to do in our program, the fruits of that won’t be realized for 20 years, when these men are husbands and fathers, leaders in the community and church. That’s how we’ll measure if we’ll be successful or not. For me, it’s not necessarily about winning championships. Would I love to do it every year? Absolutely. I’m a prideful, sinful guy, and I want to win at everything. I want to beat you at checkers.
“But this is about building young men into godly men.”
