Former players bring pride, experience to Eastern Washington football’s coaching staff: ‘They know the tradition’

Between Marc Anderson and Zach Bruce, there’s hardly a job in the Eastern Washington football program that at least one of them hasn’t done.

There’s even one – recruiting coordinator – that both have held. It wasn’t Bruce’s favorite.

“All the things that go into signing a football class,” Bruce said. “That job, being the recruiting coordinator, is one of the hardest jobs in the building.”

Bruce has been on staff at Eastern since 2020, and he played safety for the Eagles from 2012 to 2016. Anderson, with the program since 2014, has been on staff longer than anyone besides head coach Aaron Best, who first came to Cheney as a player in 1996, an entire lifetime ago for strength and conditioning coach and fellow EWU graduate Mike Perez.

They’re not alone, either. Across the 20-person coaching and support staff for the Eastern Washington football team, 10 of them are EWU graduates.

“That’s really cool to know we all have that logo on our diploma on our wall somewhere and we all get to work daily with each other,” Best said.

For Best, the benefits go beyond the sort of familiarity that makes people say “go Eags” at the grocery store, and he did not hire them simply because they already know their way around campus.

“We want to put in place the people who are best suited for the job,” Best said, “and those people happen to be Eastern people.”

Best is entering his 10th season as the Eagles’ head coach after he spent 19 of the 20 years previous to that in the program as an offensive lineman, staff member or assistant coach. He is currently the longest-tenured head coach in the Big Sky and has led the Eagles to the FCS playoffs three times.

Anderson is the fourth EWU offensive coordinator under Best. Bruce is Best’s fifth defensive coordinator and the third who was an EWU grad; Eti Ena and Jeff Schmedding were the others.

Across the Big Sky, just one other head coach – Tim Plough, who played quarterback at UC Davis – is coaching at the same program from which he graduated. Just one offensive coordinator (Brent Pease, at Montana) and one defensive coordinator (Bobby Daly, at Montana State) can say the same, too.

So it stands out that Best, Anderson and Bruce are not just coaching at their alma mater, but that they are doing so together at the same time.

“Everyone understands that we have what we have, and it’s plenty to win games and help kids graduate and go on to positively contribute to society,” Bruce said of being at Eastern. “It’s a blue-collar place, and sometimes it’s hard to find blue-collar people. You don’t really get a whole lot of complaining because most of us have been a part of winning teams here as players or as coaches, so we know what it takes.”

Bruce came to Eastern as a player in 2012 after a prep career at University High School in Spokane Valley. He was a first-team All-Big Sky player and co-captain as a senior for the Eagles and was a member of three FCS playoff teams. He returned to Eastern as safeties coach in 2020.

Bruce is also married to Delaney Hodgins, the all-time leading scorer in EWU women’s basketball history. They just had their third child this summer.

Anderson did not play college football but joined the Eagles’ staff in 2014 as video coordinator and was promoted to director of football operations in 2016. He later was recruiting coordinator, tight ends coach and associate head coach before becoming the offensive coordinator before the 2025 season.

Tamarick Pierce, the team’s running backs coach, is another Eastern graduate who played running back for the Eagles from 2015 to 2021 and was a two-year captain and first-team All-Big Sky selection.

Austin York became tight ends coach before last season after playing at the position for the Eagles from 2022 to 2024.

Five EWU graduates are on the team’s support staff: director of football operations Marcus McCurty, head trainer Kirsten Ishikawa, video coordinator and recruiting assistant Dani Warden, equipment manager Spencer Ybarra, and then Mike Perez, who played football at Eastern in 2016 and 2017 and is now the Eagles’ director of football athletic performance.

“Just the years they’ve been at Eastern, they’ve seen it,” Perez said of the EWU grads. “They’ve been around it. They know the culture. They know the tradition.”

“Across the board,” Perez said, “the experience and what we’ve done, the accolades in the room and the championship runs, those are still in the room. They haven’t left. They’re still here. And the (players), they know the stories.”

After Tuesday’s practice, redshirt junior linebacker Samarai Anderson highlighted Bruce’s long-standing EWU ties when asked about what it was like to be coached by him.

“I love it. He lets us play free. He lets his players go make plays,” Anderson said, “and he’s an Eastern guy, he’s from Spokane, grew up there, and he went here and met his wife here. I just love having the alumni with us who go all the way back to the roots.”

What this staff hasn’t yet proven, though, is their ability to add to the program’s winning tradition. Eastern hasn’t had a winning season since 2021, when it reached the second round of the FCS playoffs.

There is little doubt around the program that the coaches know what is required to get the program back to its winning ways, even if the current players haven’t experienced it themselves.

“It’s a little bit of a leg up knowing that someone has done it here, because it takes more here than it does in a lot of places,” Best said. “So, you’re attracted to those people who know what it takes.”