Mike Vorel: Husky homecoming will be a 'magical moment' for Eastern Michigan coach Chris Creighton

Sep.

6Chris Creighton will stand on the visitors' sideline inside Husky Stadium.

But don't let the sideline deceive you.

On Saturday, he'll be home.

In 1981, a 12-year-old Creighton moved from San Jose to Seattle, when his father was named rector at St.

Stephen's Episcopal Church in Laurelhurst.

He spent six years living on Northeast 45th Street, a mere two miles from Husky Stadium and Hec Edmundson Pavilion.

"You're just right smack dab in the middle of it," said the Eastern Michigan coach, whose Eagles will meet Washington for the first time this weekend.

"So I became a fan real quick." Creighton's newfound fandom yielded lifelong memories.

He attended countless men's and women's basketball games with his dad, Michael, a season-ticket holder.

He walked along the wetlands bordering Union Bay, trudging south to Husky Stadium on fall Saturdays.

After wins, he joined a crowd of kids loitering outside the locker room, hoping to receive a sweatband a priceless souvenir from quarterback Steve Pelluer.

On a clear Halloween afternoon in 1981, Creighton was among 53,504 who participated in the first "wave" inside Husky Stadium.

(Washington also outlasted Stanford for a 42-31 win.) "That was a crazy cool feeling," he said nearly 43 years later, "being a part of that." For Creighton, the wave extended outside of the stadium.

"It was a huge part of my life," he said.

"And Husky Stadium being so close ...

the games we couldn't go to, we essentially played our own games at Laurelhurst Park.

We're playing tackle football on the grass during the [UW] game, and we could literally hear the roar of the crowd." At Roosevelt High School, the roars crept closer.

Though Elizabeth Creighton forbid her son from playing football until his junior year, Chris was quickly inserted as the Roughriders' starting quarterback.

As a 6-foot-1, 185-pound senior, he earned first-team All-Metro League honors alongside future Huskies Aaron Pierce (Franklin High), Greg Lewis (Ingraham), Mario Bailey (Franklin), James Clifford (Ingraham) and Greg McCallum (Roosevelt) in 1986.

"I just remember walking off the field, after my last high school football game, and I said to myself, 'I'm not done with this sport.' I just fell in love with it," Creighton said.

"And there has not been a fall since 1985 where I have not been coaching or playing football." Football has taken Creighton across conferences and continents in the nearly four decades since.

After playing quarterback at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, he embarked on a coaching career, earning his first head job at Ottawa (Kansas) University in 1997.

And after dominant stints at Ottawa (32-9 from 1997 to 2000), Wabash (63-15 from 2001 to 2007) and Drake (44-22 from 2008 to 2013), Creighton tackled a new challenge in 2014.

Of course, calling Eastern Michigan a "challenge" is an understatement the size of Husky Stadium.

He inherited perhaps the worst program in all of college football, a sinkhole with a single Division I bowl berth in 122 years of play.

It had been 18 years since the Eagles' last winning season, a 6-5 finish in 1995.

And of their previous seven head coaches, six had been fired.

A decade later, Creighton is still going strong, having delivered six bowl appearances in 10 seasons in Ypsilanti.

He also engineered Power Five upsets of Rutgers in 2017, Purdue in 2018, Illinois in 2019 and Arizona State (a MAC team's first regular-season win over a Pac-12 program) in 2022.

That's the resume Creighton carries into his Husky homecoming on Saturday.

"Shoot, I coached and played in Sweden," the 55-year-old coach recalled.

"I've taken teams to Germany and Austria, down to Panama and Central America.

When I was at Drake, we took our team to Tanzania.

We played the first ever sanctioned football game on the continent of Africa, then climbed Kilimanjaro.

I got to go on a Middle East military appreciation tour with Chip Kelly and coach [Troy] Calhoun from Air Force and some other people.

"My whole life since [discovering the sport in Seattle] has been so associated with football.

So for me to go back now with my team, to coach and play in that stadium, is going to be a magical moment for me." Granted, it could have been even more magical.

Saturday's game nearly doubled as a staff reunion, given that Kalen DeBoer (offensive coordinator) and Ryan Grubb (offensive line coach) who both departed UW this offseason shared a sideline with Creighton at EMU from 2014 to 2016.

(As Grubb told The Times last year: "I can't stress this enough: Chris Creighton is the man.

And I mean that: he is the man.

Everything we did, he set the tone.) "I'm an emotional and sentimental person," Creighton explained.

"When our athletic director came four or five years ago and said, 'Hey, what do you think about going back to Seattle to play a game?', even just that meant a lot to me.

Gosh, then we thought we were going to play Kalen, which would have been crazy cool.

"I'm counting it as a forfeit that he's not there, by the way." Even so, Creighton will have a considerable cheering section inside Husky Stadium.

His parents, who have since moved to Maryland, will fly back to Seattle for the festivities.

Childhood friends will travel from California and New York as well.

Gregg Kalina, Creighton's junior varsity basketball coach at Roosevelt, will stand on the same sideline.

"He's the best coach I ever had," Creighton said.

"I can't wait to introduce him to our team." Creighton and Kalina haven't seen each other in 30 years, though they've continued to correspond via email.

And three weeks ago, Creighton asked Kalina who coached at Roosevelt and O'Dea for more than three decades to serve as the Eagles' honorary coach.

"Even if I had something else planned, I would have canceled it for that," said Kalina, who still provides personal training for basketball players and lives in Wedgwood.

"I'd do anything for Chris.

He deserves all the good things that can happen to a man in this world." For Creighton, plenty has happened in the 37 years since he lived in Laurelhurst since he fell in love with football, since he caught a crashing wave.

But standing on the visitors' sideline on Saturday, he'll hear a reminiscent roar.

He'll know that he is home.

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