Coyotes gain big in stealing Crook from Cincy

Ron Crook’s route to becoming tight ends and special teams coach for Bob Nielson for the University of South Dakota Coyote football team covers a lot of ground no matter how you decide to measure it.

With more than three decades as a college football coach for programs all over the country, there are bound to be a few twists and turns involved that can’t be anticipated. Over the long haul, it is most often a necessary part of the life.

When Crook added USD this spring to his resume, the Coyotes joined a list that includes stops at West Liberty State (where he played), Clarion, Glenville State, the West Virginia Institute of Technology, Illinois, Harvard, Stanford, West Virginia and most recently, Cincinnati.

So when Crook, a native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, who has spent most of that career as an offensive line coach, decided Vermillion was his next move, in an odd sense it kind of fit in with the rest of his career.

“I don’t know if you could call it an interview exactly – we talked football – and they had some questions and I had some questions and it felt like a really good fit,” said Crook, who was caught in a staff shuffle at Cincinnati under Coach Luke Fickell that resulted in becoming unnattached at a time when programs are usually done hiring. 

“It really seemed like a group of really good people here. I’ve come to realize since then that the reason they seemed like good people is that they are good people.”

Crook, whose wife and three kids remain in Cincinnati, could have taken the year off and waited until next season. A friend of Crook’s, who was also a friend of coach Bob Nielson, wondered if he’d be interested in coaching at USD this year. He was intrigued enough by the idea to read up on Nielson’s program. 

He started having conversations about the Coyotes. In the end, he said it was an easy decision, though perhaps unconventional.

“I thought, ‘Well, I can spend the year out of football or I could work with some really good guys who have had success,’” Crook said. “It became a no-brainer at that point.”

Crook’s odd set of circumstances meant the Coyotes were getting an assistant who has been at the top levels of the sport with a preposterously strong background in preparing teams for big games. 

He was coaching at the college level when several of his new colleagues were not yet old enough to play tackle football. Or even throw a football. It will make for an interesting mix for sure. 

“The important thing to remember is that they’ve been successful here,” Crook said. “Their players play hard. One thing I noticed right away from Day 1 is that these guys work. Their football is extremely important to them and you can see that in how they practice, how they work in the weight room – all those things. It’s not like somebody needs to come in and change something. I want to learn while I’m here.”

That means listening and watching and delivering expertise on a lifetime in the game when it makes sense to do so. 

“I’ll be the guy who says ‘Hey, here are a few ideas that might enhance what we’re trying to do.’ And maybe some of the stuff is incorporated and some of it doesn’t fit. It’s about building on what they’ve done here.”

As the coach of tight ends, Crook will be dealing with six players who play the position including senior Austin Goehring, the unit’s most experienced returnee. As special teams coach, however, he will be working with about half the team from just about every position group.

He listened to his interviewer tell him how a lot can go wrong on special teams and how tough it can be when you’re always one bad snap away from being viewed as a failure. 

“I really appreciate you bringing up bad snaps,” he responded. “That’s always great to be thinking about. But it’s a fun job because you work with a lot of different guys on the team. Defensive backs, linebackers, wide receivers, running backs – you can develop a relationship with all of them. That’s going to be great, especially given that I came in as recently as I did.”

Crook would call himself a “players’ coach” but it might not match up exactly with a term that occasionally has come to mean being “less demanding.” 

“I believe in stressing fundamentals over and over and over again,” he said. “Players may get sick of me talking about it, but when they go out and play on Saturday and you see those fundamentals showing up over and over and over again, that means something. If you don’t want your players to get bored with fundamentals you can’t allow yourself to get bored with coaching fundamentals.”

The fact that Crook’s wife, Stacy, and their three kids, Andrew (19), Cian (16) and Kenley (13), remain in Cincinnati is not an easy piece of this arrangement. It’s apparent, however, that his wife, who like Crook grew up in a small town in West Virginia, has a handle on the coaching life.

After they got married, his first move was to take a job at Illinois. They had a conversation about that with Stacy saying she understood this was how it was going to go given his profession. She just didn’t want to live in New England, she said, or in California.

“So our next move was to Harvard,” Crook said. “And after that it was Stanford. But she’s been great through all of it. We actually got married on the football field at West Liberty State, where I was coaching at the time. It was right at the 20-yard-line. I told her I was going into the red zone for the rest of my life.”