Ball State doesn’t play at Purdue until August 30th. But Cardinals head coach Mike Uremovich was just on the Boilermakers’ campus earlier this week. “I was dropping off my son,” said the first-year Ball State coach. “He’s a freshman in engineering.” Uremovich knew exactly where to go since he’s a 2000 Purdue graduate. “It was […]
Ball State doesn’t play at Purdue until August 30th. But Cardinals head coach Mike Uremovich was just on the Boilermakers’ campus earlier this week.
“I was dropping off my son,” said the first-year Ball State coach. “He’s a freshman in engineering.”
Uremovich knew exactly where to go since he’s a 2000 Purdue graduate.
“It was weird as heck for me,” said Uremovich. “The band’s practicing over there. I’m like: ‘Damn, this is weird as hell. I’m going to be here in two weeks.
“He’s living in Earhart. “I said, ‘You got lucky. When I was in college, it was all girls. He said: ‘No, no, it’s co-ed now. I was in Wiley Hall. Still looks the same. I drove by it.”
Ah, memories.
The next time Uremovich is back in West Lafayette driving down State Street past Von’s, he won’t be building a loft or plugging in a mini-fridge. He’ll be coaching his first game as Ball State coach … doing so vs. his alma mater. It’s believed this will be the first time a Purdue alum has coached against Purdue.
Adding to this delicious storyline: Uremovich never played a snap for the Boilermakers, unlike former Purdue players-turned-Division I-head coaches like Ron Meyer, Brock Spack and Kevin Sumlin.
“I’m not gonna lie,” he said. “I’m gonna take a minute and enjoy it a little bit in warm ups. But then when you kick that ball off, man, it’s a game.”
Uremovich was born in northwest Indiana but grew up on the far south side of Chicago, graduating from Providence Catholic in New Lenox, Ill.
Uremovich, 49, always wanted to coach. His high school coach, Matt Seffner, told him that he needed to play Division I to do so. So, being a good player, Uremovich did as he was told.
“That’s not even true,” said Uremovich. “D3, NAIA, Juco, it didn’t matter where you played. You can coach in college.”
Uremovich enrolled at Purdue in the fall of 1995 and tried out for the football team as a too small, too slow, try-hard receiver in the spring of 1996 during the Jim Colletto era.
“When I say a ‘tryout,’ you showed up, you ran a 40,” he said. “They took a height and weight. They threw me a pass. There were maybe seven guys there trying out.
“I got cut right away. I wasn’t even good enough for the scout team. But, I was told that’s what I had to do, so I tried it.”
Fortunate for Uremovich, Don Coller was at the try out. He was the head coach at McCutcheon High in Lafayette across the Wabash River.
“He probably took a look at me and said, ‘I know this dude ain’t gonna make it,’ and asked me what I was doing. And I said, ‘Well, I’m just doing this because I want to coach.’ And then he said, ‘Well, if you don’t make it, you want to coach? We always need help on our freshman team at McCutcheon.’ “
Uremovich called Coller that spring. And … Voila! A coaching career was born.
After two years with McCutcheon, Uremovich moved on to coach at his old high school. He would go to Purdue in West Lafayette in the spring, transfer to Purdue-Calumet in the fall while he coached prep football. He transferred back and forth four times.
“I would just drive across the border for school,” he said. “My classes, I only had them two days a week, and I would go back and coach high school in Chicago.”
Uremovich’s busy schedule didn’t allow him to attend many Purdue games. Or hang out at Harry’s.
“I was coaching, watching film,” he said.
“I’ve been lucky,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of people help me, a lot of really good head coaches that have helped me along the way. But, yes, I am very fortunate to be in this position.”
Among others who shaped Uremovich: N.C. State coach Dave Doeren, who hired Uremovich at Northern Illinois from St. Francis College in Joliet, Ill., an NAIA school where he was head coach. Uremovich followed Doeren to N.C. State.
“In terms of being a college, I’ve learned a lot from everybody,” said Uremovich. “But just how to run a college program, the organization and the staff and the recruiting and what it takes to build consistency in a program, I probably learned the most from him.”
And, of course, Coller.
“Coach Coller giving me an opportunity, and him teaching me how to work and how to coach,” said Uremovich. “He was a high school coach, but he had been at Purdue prior, so he ran his program like it was a college program. We were in there, in meetings after the game on a Friday night. We’d watch the film after the game on Friday night and stay late so we could be ready for the kids on Saturday.
“I could have been on just some high school staff that didn’t take it that seriously, and that would have been the habits I formed. He knew I wanted to coach college, so he really went out of his way to teach me and tell me things.”
That knowledge has gotten Uremovich to Ball State, a job he took in the offseason after a successful three-year run at Butler. Now, he’s poised to return to his college stomping grounds in the next phase of his fast-rising career.
“I know that all my fraternity brothers (Alpha Kappa Lamba) and my wife’s sorority sisters and all my family, we’ll have a ton of people there, and they’ll all be having a great time,” he said. “I’ll just be worried about the game.”
Category: General Sports
