Former Eastern Washington football players want to make financial impact

Hundreds of Eastern Washington football players are ready to get back in the game.

They’ve been on the sideline for years, cheering on the Eagles while hoping the rest of the game-day experience will catch up.

Now they want to offer something more than moral support as the school struggles to find funds for improvements to Roos Field and other football-related projects.

“I think there’s a lot of pride in what’s happened on the field,” said former Eastern linebacker Bryan Jarrett, one of the founders of the Eagle Football Network, a group for former players to reconnect and give back to the program.

“What (former coaches) Beau Baldwin and Paul Wulff have put together on the field is a Pac-12-type product,” said Jarrett, who played at Eastern from 2004-07 and later for the Spokane Shock.

“But what we’re seeing of the off-the-field environment, it’s more like an NAIA program,” Jarrett said.

While that is debatable – the Eagles have improved the game-day experience in recent years – fundraising for capital projects has lagged behind most of Eastern’s Big Sky Conference rivals.

The Eagle Network doesn’t expect to make a dent – yet – but give it time. Even as the school hired an outside consultant to improve fundraising, Jarrett and fellow football alumnus Paul Terrell have discussed ways to help the overall effort that doesn’t undercut the school’s efforts.

“The school is doing the best it can, but this is more of a general collaborative effort,” said Terrell, an offensive lineman from 2000-04. Now a graphic designer in downtown Spokane, he’s led the design of the group’s website.

Its goal is two-fold: to aid in fundraising and renew connections among the many hundreds of former Eagle players. The cost to join is $125 annually.

The group already has about 250 members on its Facebook group, which is open only to former players and EWU staff.

Eastern’s football alums have embraced the idea, said Terrell, who recently was visited by a 1970s-era player who brought in photos and other memorabilia to help illustrate the website.

“He was pretty excited - that was pretty cool,” Terrell said. “We’re giving these former players a chance to get closer to the program.”

The idea has been in the making for several months, as Terrell, Jarrett and others have followed the news from Cheney. Like most fans, they were hopeful that something concrete would emerge from either the Gateway Project or other scaled-back proposals floated in recent years.

“The general feeling was they’ve got this covered, that somebody was going to come up with a fat check,” said Jarrett.

Lots of smaller checks also could make the difference, say Terrell and Jarrett, who said they want to complement, not compete with the athletic department’s fundraising arm, the Eagle Athletic Fund.

Besides raising camaraderie, Jarrett said the group hopes to present a “five- or six-figure check” to help the program “however we can.”

That in turn can raise public awareness, said Terrell, who added that “right now, for the general population, all they see is that nothing is happening.”

For many players, the group also offers a way to pay back the school.

“I think that for anyone who has been in athletics, has a hard time repeating that feeling of family after they graduate,” Terrell said. “This is something special.”