Eagles find Sturdy position
Todd Sturdy, a successful athlete and coach at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, is the new offensive coordinator for the Eastern Washington football team.
“He brings great experience as a coach with proven success,” Eagles coach Paul Wulff said Thursday. “He will be a good fit.”
Sturdy was a quarterback for the Fighting Bees before getting into coaching. St. Ambrose went 85-40 under Sturdy, including 10-0 last year before losing a double-overtime game in the NAIA playoffs.
“He’s done a lot of different things,” Wulff said. “He’s shown the ability to adjust to the talent he has.”
Sturdy replaces Beau Baldwin, who was named head coach at Central Washington, his alma mater, in January.
The Eagles have also hired Chris Peterson, a graduate assistant at Idaho and former quarterback at Cal Poly, as a restricted earnings coach. He will coach running backs and EWU assistant Joe Wade will shift to receivers, replacing Keith Murphy, who joined the St. Louis Rams.
On defense, graduate assistant Jeff Schmedding, a University High School graduate, has been hired full time and will coach safeties.
Jody Sears, also the defensive coordinator, moves to defensive ends. The position opened when defensive end coach Brian Strandley became defensive coordinator at Idaho State University.
Linebacker coach Travis Niekamp replaces Murphy as the special teams coordinator.
The staffing changes took a little longer than Wulff would have liked, with spring practice scheduled to start April 9.
“We’re going to be behind a little bit, but we’ve had a system in place since 1996,” Wulff said. “The kids won’t have to adjust. For a lot of years we’ve had (a top offense) under four different coordinators. There are a lot of things we’ve used here that seem to work.”
Sturdy was the NAIA Region 2 coach of the year after getting the Fighting Bees to the playoffs for the fifth time in seven years. They had their first undefeated regular season since 1949.
He was the quarterback in 1987 when the school won its first playoff game.
He started as a graduate assistant in 1990, moved up to a defensive assistant the next year and became defensive coordinator in 1994.
He was an interim head coach for the last seven games in 1995 and was named head coach following the season.