VANCOUVER — Last spring, coming off the team’s first Canada West title and Vanier Cup appearance since 2015, Blake Nill’s cel phone began to elicit some interesting activity from the 403 area code.
“When the University of Calgary decided not to bring in Wayne for this season, it was funny because I got calls from three or four Calgary (Dinos) alums saying that I should bring him to UBC,” Thunderbirds’ head coach Nill said Tuesday of the rival program’s former head coach Wayne Harris, whom UBC officially announced on Monday as its new linebackers coach.
UBC opens the 2024 season Friday (6 p.m.) at Thunderbird Stadium against the Alberta Golden Bears in a rematch of last season’s Hardy Cup conference championship game, decided so memorably in walk-off fashion 28-27 by the ‘Birds.
Harris, a Dinos’ lifer who served as Calgary’s defensive coordinator for the final five of Nill’s nine seasons (2006-14) at the helm of the U of C’s program, subsequently succeeded his boss as the program’s head coach when Nill came west to the Point Grey campus in 2015.
Over his first five seasons (2015-19) as Dinos head coach, Harris led Calgary to five straight Hardy Cup finals and won the Canada West title three times, two of them coming in back-to-back years over UBC by heart-stopping scores of 46-43 in 2016 and 44-43 in 2017, the latter on a 56-yard walk-off field goal by kicker Niko DiFonte.
Nill explained Tuesday that those phone calls got him thinking.
“It had never entered my mind, but when I was getting those calls I was thinking ‘You know what, there just might be something there.’ So I texted Wayne back in the spring and I said ‘Wayne, I am just planting a seed. I think you would be pretty good out here.’ He wrote me back and he said ‘Seed planted.’”
At that stage, there was not an opening on the UBC coaching staff and Nill didn’t know if it would really go any further.
“You only want to bring him in if there is a legit role for him, but then later we had our unfortunate situation with coach Dorazio,” Nill continued.
(Editor’s note: Varsity Letters will delve deeper into the incredible impact veteran offensive line coach Dan Dorazio had on the UBC program as part of an upcoming story we are producing on the team’s offensive line. Coach Dorazio succumbed to illness on Aug. 13 and the team continues to mourn his loss).
Dan Dorazio’s passing left a huge void in the hearts and minds of the Thunderbirds, and in the day-to-day realities of the game he loved, an equally huge void in the UBC coaching department.
Nill had begun a shuffle within the team’s coaching ranks by naming special team’s coordinator Peter Buckley the team’s new offensive line coach.
Chief recruiter and linebacker coach Shomari Williams was then tabbed to become the team’s new special team’s coordinator.
Yet through the early days of camp, longtime defensive coordinator Pat Tracey and Nill filled in to try and make up for a manpower shortage on the defensive side of coaching staff.
“I was lying awake one night and I said to myself that I needed to pull the trigger, so the next day I called (Harris) and I said ‘Look man, if we think we can make this work, let’s do it.’ Five days later he was out here.”
As Harris gets up to speed with his positional group, led by the star fifth-year backer Jaxon Ciraolo-Brown, the vast overall wisdom he brings to the Blue-and-Gold seems as much a resource as anything.
“You can’t have enough experienced coaches,” Nill continued as Harris prepared for what was just his third UBC practice on Tuesday. “Wayne brings energy, knowledge… and I really think it is renewed. And once he gets into that same working space with coach Tracey for a few weeks, you’ve got 70 years of coaching experience there.”
At the first team meeting on the first day of fall camp, Nill dangled an irresistible challenge in front of the assembled mass of players looking to make their mark as 2024 UBC Thunderbirds.
“We talked about how it had been 37 years since a UBC team had been able to repeat,” Nill said of what, for the football team, has seemed a most elusive trick: Winning the Hardy Cup — emblematic of Canada West football supremacy — in back-to-back seasons.
UBC has not done the double since the 1986-87 seasons, and if you think about it in those precise terms, it’s actually been easier for the team to win Vanier Cup national titles.
The ’Birds have won two of those (1997, 2015) since they last ruled the Canada West roost in back-to-back seasons.
For a team stinging from it’s 16-9 loss to the Montreal Carabins in last November’s Vanier Cup final, Nill’s challenge seems like the perfect carrot to chase as the new season opens.
And as part of that chase, it’s interesting to note that as U SPORTS head coaches, Nill and Harris have a combined resume of 23 conference championship game appearances and a stunningly-high mark of 17 conference titles. There is also the not-so-small matter of four combined Vanier Cups.
Of course, the vast majority of those belong to Nill.
Incredibly, he’s won 14 conference titles in 18 conference final game appearances. That’s how the math works when you add up the two crowns from his UBC years (2015, 2023) to the six straight titles he won at both St. Mary’s (1999-2004) and Calgary (2008-13). Nill also won two Vanier Cups at St. Mary’s (2001, 2002) and one in his first year at UBC (2015).
Harris took the Dinos to the Hardy Cup final his first five years at Calgary and won three titles. He also led Calgary to the 2019 Vanier Cup championship.
Maybe his added bit of karma will be enough to help the Thunderbirds break a near four-decade drought of back-to-back Canada West titles.
Simply stated, not looking ahead to the Vanier Cup by keeping all of the focus on the week-to-week pursuit of the Hardy Cup suits the offensive leader of the Thunderbirds just fine.
“Obviously, when you make it to the Vanier Cup, make it to a huge game like that, a lot of the guys will focus on reaching that point again,” said UBC’s fourth-year veteran quarterback Garrett Rooker, “but the coaches have instilled in us that the Canada West (title) is our goal… to come in each week and protect our home field advantage and at the end of the day make it so that we are playing at home (in the playoffs).
“Winning Canada West is our main focus,” Rooker continued. “Everything else that follows that? We’ll get there when we get there.”
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