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By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
The youngest head football coach in the Western Athletic Conference takes his father to work with him, sort of.
Meet 38-year-old Steve Kragthorpe, for whom one of the first acts after taking over at the University of Tulsa in December was to hire his 70-year-old father, Dave, to be the Golden Hurricane's director of football programs.
Kragthorpe, who pays his father a $1-a-year-stipend to serve as a sounding board and also help out in non-football areas like fund-raising, likes to say, "sometimes I think he's overpaid."
Tongue-in-cheek humor aside, theirs is a partnership not often seen on the Division I-A level. While it is not unheard of for fathers to hire their sons in college football, the flip side of the equation is exceedingly rare.
S. KRAGTHORPE
It has been more than a gesture of filial piety at Tulsa, where the University of Hawai'i will arrive for Saturday's game to find a team that has won back-to-back games for the first time in three seasons.
Suddenly, the Golden Hurricane is starting to think of itself as something more than the conference caboose it has been the past two seasons. Most noticeable in the 2-2 start is the stirring of an offense. After finishing among the bottom 10 in the nation the previous three seasons, Tulsa scored 40 points or more in the past two games for the first time in 12 years.
What has happened "has been wonderful for all of us," said Barbara, Steve's mother. "Especially since we never expected him to follow in his father's footsteps."
Indeed, the only reason Kragthorpe got into coaching was that as a graduate assistant with a growing family, working under his father at Oregon State got him a tuition waiver to complete his MBA.
But by the time graduation came, he had acquired a passion for coaching. "I saw the impact my father had on a lot of young guys," Kragthorpe said. "I tell people I have one brother by blood (Kurt, a sports columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune) and 50 other guys my dad coached."
Later, as an assistant at Northern Arizona, North Texas, Boston College, Texas A&M and the Buffalo Bills, Kragthorpe said he decided that hiring his father "was something I wanted to do if I ever got a head job."
Not that his father is above attempting to disguise his pride with a needle or two. Said Kragthorpe: "My dad always tells people he worked for LaVell (Edwards at BYU), and he and LaVell played together at Utah State. He says, 'Heck, LaVell raised a doctor, a lawyer and an author (but) I don't know where I went wrong — I raised a coach and a sportswriter."
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.
