‘I am Rocky’: Canadian-born Nolan Ulm, an Eastern Washington receiver, reshaped lifestyle to play Division I football

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eastern Washington held its football meetings virtually, as so much of the world did in 2020.

It was through that medium Robert “Tre” Mason III first met Nolan Ulm, whom he said “just looked like a regular dude.”

It wasn’t until months later that Mason, who transferred from Central Washington just as Ulm joined the team as a true freshman, saw his new teammate on the practice field for the first time. Almost immediately, it was apparent that his Canadian-born teammate was a little bit different.

“He took his shirt off and he was wearing a heart monitor,” Mason said. “He had this idea that the Americans took all these workouts real seriously. He overestimated all the work that we do. He came in overprepared.”

Yet as Mason got to know Ulm, he came to realize that Ulm isn’t one to settle for something less than a total effort. Ulm has goals, and when he speaks of them, there is no hedging.

“His vision is super clear. He doesn’t say, ‘Oh, if I make it,’ ” said Mason, now a senior. “That’s not in his vocabulary.”

And for the Eagles – who continue their season Saturday in Cheney when they host unbeaten Sacramento State – “if” Ulm will be an impact player sometime down the road has not been the question. He already is.

Playing in his third season but still just a sophomore due to the pandemic, Ulm is third on the team in receptions (14), receiving yards (162) and touchdowns (two) while continuing to play a prominent role on special teams.

“You could really tell he was emerging as a leader even last year, but our room was stacked,” Mason said of the team’s wide receiving corps that included Andrew Boston and Talolo Limu-Jones. “He hadn’t fully made the plays yet. Coming into this year, people had an idea he would be the guy to step up.

“He’s really emerging.”

‘I am ‘Rocky’ ’

Scan the rosters of Big Sky teams and you won’t find many Canadians on the 12 rosters. Ulm is one of four.

Ulm was born in Edmonton, Alberta, but grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia, which is about a five-hour drive from Spokane. It is much better known for its hockey players; the Spokane Chiefs of the Western Hockey League recently had two Kelowna players on the roster in Eli Zummack and Jack Finley.

But Finley, who has known Ulm since they were in middle school, said he’d never seen Ulm on skates.

“I remember him being this super enthusiastic sports guy who was an absolute beast,” Finley said this week from Syracuse, New York, where he is set to open the season with the AHL’s Syracuse Crunch. “He wasn’t as big into football back then, but sports in general – he was just so passionate.”

By his own admission, Ulm wasn’t all that committed to football – until losing a junior varsity game his grade 9 year (as Canadians call ninth grade).

“I remember standing there on the field just thinking I was done being good,” Ulm said. “I wanted to be something special. I wanted to change myself.”

Soon after, just before he embarked on a family vacation to Hawaii, he watched on TV “Rocky V,” a film he’d never before seen. He didn’t even know there were five of them.

So he asked his grandmother to get all the “Rocky” films, and she did, in Blu-Ray.

“Every night on the vacation, I watched these ‘Rocky’ movies and I changed my life,” Ulm said.

“Holy smokes,” he said he thought to himself while watching them. “I am ‘Rocky.’ ”

He ratcheted up his meals and his workouts, and he set his goal on playing Division I football, which at the time felt lofty, he said, because, “Man, I sucked.”

Canadian high school football, while growing in popularity, is not what it is in the United States, said Chris Cartwright, Ulm’s coach at Kelowna Secondary School. That surge is not just in Kelowna but across British Columbia, he said.

Cartwright first met Ulm when he was a freshman, and even then it was clear that he had an urgency to do well.

“He knew what he wanted, and he did whatever he could to get it,” Cartwright said. “It was an amazing thing to see.”

Though popular in Kelowna, hockey never interested Ulm. Both Ulm and Cartwright compared hockey in Kelowna to football in Texas in terms of the passion connected with it. Once you get into the sport, it gets expensive both in money and time.

“(In Kelowna) you’re either a hockey family or you’re not,” Ulm said. “And if you’re not, you’re really not.”

That didn’t keep Ulm from making friends, like Finley, who played the sport. But he was always more focused on track and football. To get noticed, Ulm attended a number of camps in the United States, some as far away as Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.

It quickly became apparent to him that he had two selling points: His work ethic and his home country, because it was something that separated him from other guys at camps and got coaches to take notice.

Eventually, he got an offer from the University of Toledo, something he said “was a big part of me getting on the map.”

He also attended Eastern Washington’s football camp, and that led to a visit early in the 2019 season when the Eagles hosted Lindenwood (Missouri). He hadn’t heard much, though, over the summer, so Ulm wasn’t sure how interested the Eagles were. At the time, he was close to committing to play at the University of North Dakota.

But then he sat down in EWU coach Aaron Best’s office.

“Four minutes in he offered me, and my heart hit the floor – in a good way,” Ulm said.

A podcast is born

Since his arrival at Eastern, Ulm has been focused on making the NFL – again, to Ulm, it is not a matter of “if” – but the first couple of seasons, he said, “were rough.”

“I was trying to chase Coop, like we all are,” Ulm said, referring to Super Bowl MVP and former EWU receiver Cooper Kupp. “His stats off the bat were just crazy, and I tried to start to control things that were out of my control.”

Ulm did not catch 93 passes like Kupp did when he was a freshman; in the COVID-shortened season in the spring of 2021, Ulm had one catch for 9 yards.

But Ulm said he realized something else: Life wasn’t about the stats. It was about impacting people.

Ulm has two brothers, ages 5 and 6, who live in Kelowna with his mom Kelsey and stepfather Thomas Ulm, who legally adopted Nolan when he was a kid. One way Ulm thought he could give back to those younger siblings was to share with them some of the lessons he had learned in his 20 years of life.

That’s how his “Make It Happen Podcast” was born in July, when he dropped the first episode.

It now has 15 episodes, some of them featuring other football players, ranging from current teammates, like Mitchell Johnson, to former EWU players in the NFL, such as Kendrick Bourne and Nsimba Webster.

Finley said he has listened to many episodes, some of them multiple times.

“It’s super inspirational stuff,” Finley said.

Mason said when Ulm sent out the first episode, the whole team shouted him out on Instagram and “it really took off.”

The podcast is one more thing to which Ulm has committed himself, but he said sacrificing some sleep now is worth it if he impacts a few more lives.

“It does take up some time, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the stuff I’ve got going on,” Ulm said

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“Every day I see the stadium, and it’s such a blessing to be here.”