[ back ]
New Gilmour coach goes from pros to preps
(by Steve Novak - June 17, 2009)
New Gilmour coach goes from pros to preps
By STEVE NOVAK
During more than 30 years in football, Matt Simon has helped to coach two Super Bowl championship teams and several winning college programs. But earlier this year, he saw an opportunity he couldn't pass up.
Gilmour Academy was looking for a new football coach.
"I'm an Ohio native," he said. "I'd been waiting to come back to work in Ohio. This was too exciting an opportunity to let it go by."
Last weekend, most of Gilmour's students were packing up to go home for summer break. But for Simon, it was just the beginning phase of his new job. He held some preliminary drills last week with some of the members of next fall's varsity. The season opener is less than 11 weeks away.
Simon, a 55-year-old native of Akron, has been involved in football long enough to see the inherent challenge in taking over a football team that has made it to the playoffs six out of the last seven years.
"I want to solidify the program to the point where it can survive," he said. "I want to update the program, to build the numbers up, to work hard to keep a consistency."
Simon's path up the coaching ladder was anything but a direct route. He played linebacker at Eastern New Mexico University. He had planned to go to law school when he finished his undergraduate studies.
"I had no intention to coach," said Simon, who graduated from Akron Buchtel High School. "But after college, a friend of mine talked me into coaching. I was tired of being broke, so I said yes."
About a year after graduating, Simon was back at his alma mater of Eastern New Mexico as an assistant coach. That was followed by one year as a high school coach and then he was hired as the linebacker coach at University of Texas at El Paso.
In 1982, Simon was hired as the running backs coach at the University of Washington. He still was coaching there when Washington shared the NCAA national championship in 1991 with Miami.
Simon then coached at New Mexico University and North Texas State. During those years, he met San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh and then Mike Shanahan, which led him to being hired as a coach for the Denver Broncos.
He was hired by the Broncos the same season that Denver won the Super Bowl in 1998 with a 31-24 victory over the Green Bay Packers. After just one year in the pros, Simon had the distinction of being a Super Bowl coach.
For the next six years, Simon served as the running backs coach for the Baltimore Ravens. During that time, Baltimore as a team rushed for at least 2,000 yards in three different seasons. Included in this span was a team record of 2,674 rushing yards in 2003 when Jamal Lewis was named NFL Offensive Player of the Year.
His tenure with the Ravens also included the year 2001, when the Ravens were Super Bowl champions with a 34-7 defeat of the New York Giants. It was his second association with a national champion in less than five years.
Simon's most recent job before accepting the Gilmour post was serving as a coach and liaison for the National Football League's player development program throughout Europe. He spent a lot of time in Spain, developing and coaching athletes who have a chance to advance the NFL.
He said that when all is considered, there won't be that much changing that he needs to do, in transition from working with seasoned veterans to coaching high school athletes.
"Coaches are coaches. We're all fundamentalists," Simon said. "You just have to change gears. The difference is in management, and you have to understand what age level they are. Kids aren't like professional players. You don't expect them to drive away from practice in their Mercedes-Benz to go home to their wife and kids. Football is still football."
Simon takes over the football program which was headed since 2002 by Bob Spicer. Earlier this year, Spicer said turned 65 and that was a major factor in his retirement.
During his tenure at Gilmour, Spicer compiled a record of 63 wins and 17 losses. Two of Spicer's teams had undefeated records during the regular season. In his first year as coach, Gilmour advanced to the playoffs for the first time since 1995.
[ back ]
