Answering the coaching call

Their coaching voices are as different as Placido Domingo and Thomas Hampson.

Ed Fisher is the quiet teacher, softer spoken at most times, although the voice rises as needed. A tenor if you will.

Dick Zornes is louder, deeper. The voice is quicker in cadence and quicker to rise. A baritone.

With both, what you hear is what you get.

“They have so much knowledge about what to do,” Austin Wardsworth said. “They just know the game, like what to do in certain situations. Just a lot of knowledge on football.”

Wardsworth should know. A three-year starting lineman for the East Valley Knights, Wardsworth is experiencing first hand what a little coaching experience can do.

“I have a lot of respect for both of them,” Wardsworth said. “They push you to make you better. I like it that way. And I’m getting better.”

Dick Zornes, 61, and Ed Fisher, 56, are rookie coaches once again, this time not at Eastern Washington, where both began their coaching journeys years and years ago, but at East Valley High, working for Adam Fisher, Ed’s son.

On the surface, the only things they seem to have in common are their age and experience – and roots from the same coaching family tree.

Zornes was a two-way player for the Savages (yes, it was that long ago), earning second-team Associated Press Little All-Northwest recognition at safety in 1966. But he was more than that. A two-way player (including fullback) for a team that had limited resources, he learned both sides of the ball from late coaching legend Dave Holmes. That helped immeasurably when he started as a grad assistant at Eastern, before following Holmes to the University of Hawaii, then finally finding his way back to Cheney where he took over as his alma mater’s head coach in 1979.

In 15 years in that role, he guided the Eagles from the NAIA to the NCAA, he won a school-record 89 games (losing 66), he took two teams (1985 and 1992) to the 1-AA playoffs and won a school record 26 Big Sky Conference contests.

He earned a reputation as an intense, driven, outspoken, successful team leader, even when he served as Eastern’s athletic director, his last role in Cheney, before retiring in 1999.

Fisher’s path also included a college stop in Cheney, where he was a freshman in Zornes’ first coaching season. He also earned Little All-Northwest second-team honors (1969 and 1970 as a cornerback), and was an NAIA honorable mention All-American at the same spot in 1970, his senior year.

In a sense, he was a three-way player. He is still in the Eagles’ top 10 for career average per catch (16.9), although the one Eastern football record Fisher holds by himself is for most punts in a season (78), set in 1968. In the spring there was track, where he still is fourth on the Eagles’ all-time list with a 24-foot, 5 1/2 -inch long jump in 1970, when he finished fifth at the NAIA nationals.

Fisher also coached in Hawaii for Holmes (whom both he and Zornes credit for their coaching success) before choosing a different path, becoming a high school teacher and coach.

At South Kitsap High in Port Orchard he built one of the state’s most successful programs, basically from scratch. In his 23 years at South Kitsap, the Wolves were 197-48, won a state large-school title in 1994, appeared in the championship game two other times and made the playoffs 17 consecutive years.

After the 1996 season, Fisher called it quits and moved into administration, eventually moving back to Spokane to work at North Central. He got out of education for good in 2003 and now is the executive director of the National Athletic Equipment Reconditioners Association, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based company which oversees and certifies reconditioning of equipment (such as football helmets) by manufacturers.

But at their heart, Zornes and Fisher are coaches.

When Ed’s son Adam had three openings on his EV staff this summer, the rest of their bodies became coaches again, too.

“I told Adam the only way I would ever help is if he had three openings,” Ed said, “and then only after he examined every avenue for replacements. After Adam looked everywhere (for replacement), he told me, ‘Dad, I checked everything,’ so I said OK. But, even with me, we were still down two.”

Ed had an idea: “What if I call Dick?” A phone call was made and the process started.

Zornes had one wish: to have some autonomy over an area of the team. After talking more than once to the younger Fisher during the summer, Zornes came aboard as the offensive line coach.

The older Fisher? He had some reservations as well, hoping his son could find coaches in the building (“As an administrator I firmly believe you want people in the building because it just makes for a better climate,” Ed said) but ready to step in if needed.

He was. So now he works for his son. So how’s that, Adam?

“It was harder when I was first a head coach,” Adam said, adding Ed’s occasional suggestions at that time were tough to deal with. “Now I guess I’ve hardened up a little bit. You have to be yourself as a head coach. You have to be your own personality. There are certain things I’m not able to do that he did.

“So I’m not as worried about him looking over my shoulder. He may disagree, and that happens sometimes, I mean daily, but when I say that’s the way we’re going to do it, that’s it.”

Adam and his Knights have experienced success, culminating in last year’s run to the State 3A quarterfinals. With a strong contingent returning from that 9-3 team, much was expected this season.

But there was the staff turnover. The inevitable questions whether Zornes and Ed Fisher could fit in. Though the questions didn’t come from them or the head coach, despite a 0-2 start.

“As far as where we are sitting record-wise, no it hasn’t been what I expected,” Adam said. “But the coaching part it’s been great. We’ve ironed some things out staff-wise, we’re communicating a little better. Like anything, it takes a while to jell. We’re jelling as a staff and the players are jelling as well.”

Zornes, who hasn’t been on a high school field as a coach since … well, never, expected a transitional period, and hasn’t been disappointed.

“I had to adjust to them a little bit and their ability to absorb (information),” he said. “If Ed and I talk about anything, it’s to try to get kids to focus when they are not in the drill, as much as anything, so that the learning process goes on for everybody. That’s always an adjustment.

“Do I think I coach these kids better now than I did four weeks ago? Yes, because I think two things have happened. I’ve learned a little bit about them and they’ve learned a little bit about me. There is more of a trust on my part that they’re hearing what I’m saying, and there’s a trust on their part that what I’m saying to them is what they need to hear. That’s just part of coaching.”

Zornes’ way of coaching is to be a vocal leader, leading from the front lines so to speak. The Knights linemen know where they stand – on every play.

“The O-line, we’re not huge, but he gets after us and gets us going,” Wardsworth said. “He gets us fired up for the games and gets us off the ball. What we need to know during the game, we know it.”

The transition has been easier on the elder Fisher, who has stayed involved in high school sports since he quit coaching. He sees little difference in the EV kids and the South Kitsap boys.

“If you dropped me back into ‘74 or ‘84 or ‘94, the kids haven’t changed very much,” he said. “They still want to please coaches. Younger kids have a tendency to drift, so you have to get after them from time to time. But there is very little change in kids.

“Granted, they have tattoos and earrings but, when you talk with them, they still have the same issues we had before. But they’re still fun to be around. They want to do well and most of them think they can do well, but you have to kind of tell them they did well and that they did a good job, and you can literally see them rise like bread.”

On the field Fisher is the baker and the running backs his dough. The last couple of weeks, they’ve been cooking.

Junior Ryan Campbell, who ran for 808 yards and five touchdowns last year, has 605 yards in four games this season (368 in the last two) and has already run for 13 touchdowns. Included in that total are scoring runs of 65 and 63 yards.

All occurred behind a Zornes-coached offensive line, although neither he nor Ed wants to take much credit.

“This is a great coaching staff and Ed and I are lucky to be working with them,” Zornes said. “They’ve done a great job of building a program, and we kind of stepped in.

“Our styles are not necessarily always their styles. I’ve got two really good assistants, Cajun (Smith) and John Phelan, who are two really good offensive line coaches. Between the three of us, we see a lot of different things.”

Between Zornes and the elder Fisher, they see things a lot of different ways – and express them in different ways.

But there is one thing on which they agree.

“It’s been great, it’s been a lot of fun,” Zornes said. “More than anything, it’s been a lot of fun.”

“For a football coach who hasn’t coached in a while,” Ed said, “and obviously I enjoy this age group, and also being a father watching your son do the right things, you get kind of a double-shot. Then there’s the other thing, getting to coach with Dick has really helped me a lot because, in the past when I stopped by, there seemed to have been one or two or three generations of football that had passed by. Now it’s fun because Dick and I can talk.”

Wardsworth sees it from a different perspective. When asked if he thought Zornes and Fisher would know who 50 Cent was, the senior laughed.

“I don’t know if coach Zornes would, but I think Fisher might,” he said.